Monday 26 April 2010

The internet's broken pottery

Visiting MySpace these days is a surreal experience. I bit like walking around in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Exactly like that.


Having been right in MySpace's target market during its golden age and then the target of Facebook's early push in the UK, I always thought it was a slow shift of people to the latter, with conversations gradually moving over.

Looking at all the profiles now though, It's like a bomb went off in 2007 and killed everything dead. In social media world, a month seems like a ridiculous amount of time to go without an update, and yet there I am on MySpace, apparently in the first year of university. As are most of the friends I have on there.

The thing is, I don't want to update it now. Mostly because I probably won't venture back on there until 2013, but also because it kind of feels like a Time Team excavation, with everything preserved as it was three or four years ago.

All the conversations, the stories, the fads. What feels like an entire eco-system just stopped, while the rest of the internet kept on, and keeps on updating. So much about being a Planner seems to be investigating the hidden stories behind actions and a social network frozen in time is a gold mine of interesting tales.

And there I was, an idiot, being an idiot. It's reassuring to know that the working life hasn't changed me.

3 comments:

sophielovestea said...

Brilliant blog Morts! Very true, I may now go and log in to see what I was up to when I was 18...

Hirsty said...

Where is the link? I swaybackmachine indexing this stuff? I not, it poses interesting questions about archiving and its usefulness in days to come.

Hirsty said...

wow - I should have proof-read that. Before posting. Apologies.