LOL check this out: The militarization of MySpace
By Nick Turse
Those young years can be hard ones. The acne, the awkwardness, the angst. That may be one reason, if you're between your early teens and your mid-20s, you may already be making "friends" in the cozy cyber-confines of MySpace.com, the social networking website that bills itself as "an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends".
At MySpace, each user can create a customized webpage or "profile", upload photos (only from your best angle and then
Photoshopped to the hilt), blog around the clock, and - most important of all - court those "friends".
In an eerie reflection of the very world many MySpace scenesters undoubtedly plunge into cyberspace to avoid, the measure of success at the site is how much you can increase your page's popularity. You do this by posting attention-grabbing content, breathlessly soliciting other users, putting up provocative pictures to attract attention, sending out "bulletins" to your existing "friends" and asking them to "whore" you out to their list of friends. With its multimillions of "friends" to garner, the site is wildly popular - and not just for insecure teens, either.
MySpace has become a magnet for those who want, for one reason or another, to draw young eyeballs (and often young pocketbooks). Colleges, corporate products such as Toyota's Yaris and the Honda Element, even fictional characters such as Ricky Bobby from the movie Talladega Nights or fast-food outlet Wendy's minimalist cartoon pitchman Smart, have already gotten into the MySpace act.
In August, the site hit a major milestone - 100 million profiles. Even including those corporate-sponsored sites and fictional pages, that's still a whole lot of would-be friends.
Recently, Fortune magazine reported that MySpace, bought by Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch in 2005 as part of a US$580 million deal, "passed Google in terms of traffic" and now ranks second only to Yahoo in page views with 1 billion daily. Already "home to 2.2 million bands, 8,000 comedians, thousands of filmmakers and millions of striving, attention-starved wanna-bes", the magazine reported that, on a typical day, it signs up 230,000 new users.
While the site's meteoric growth might be slowing of late, it has shown special skill in recruiting people since its launch in 2003. In the same years that MySpace has become an Internet superpower, the US Armed Forces have sustained substantial losses.
Bogged down in unpopular occupations of two countries with no sign of victory in sight, the US military has lowered its standards and now recruits, writes Brad Knickerbocker in the Christian Science Monitor, "more soldiers from the 'lowest acceptable' category based on test scores, education levels, personal background and other indicators of ability".
Little wonder, then, with 80% of MySpace users reporting they're over 18 years old, that the military has set its sights on occupying some virginal virtual territory in its search for fresh-faced recruits who might be thrown into the Afghan and Iraqi breaches.
So the US Marine Corps launched its MySpace profile. A thoroughly predictable page, it boasts a streaming video that might best be termed boot-camp-on-speed - complete with clips of a stereotypical drill instructor barking out commands and a bullet-cam speeding toward a target on the rifle range.
The site even offers downloadable desktop wallpapers, mainly Marine Corps "anchor and globe" emblems or photos of World War II-vintage marines. Conspicuously, there isn't a modern image in sight in any way evocative of the war in Iraq (deployment pressure from which recently caused the corps to announce that it would force reservists to return involuntarily to duty because of a lack of volunteers).
By July, according to an Associated Press report, "430 people had asked to contact a marine recruiter through the site ... including some 170 who are considered 'leads' or prospective marine recruits". With Iraq sapping its strength, even those modest figures must be music to Marine Corps ears.
By mid-September, the marines already had close to 21,000 MySpace "friends" endorsing their page, just below the 22,000 garnered by the "unauthorized" Noam Chomsky page and way below Yaris's 70,000. But a respectable number nonetheless.
In August, not to be left out, the US Air Force launched its own page. Along with the already requisite downloadable wallpapers, it offered youthful visitors the opportunity to click to chat with an air force "adviser". Colonel Brian Madtes, the air force recruiting service's strategic communications director, was blunt about the reasons in an "interview" with the air force's own news agency: "In order to reach young men and women today, we need to be in tune and engaged in their circles. MySpace.com is a great way to get the word out to the public about the amazing things people are doing in the air force."
One-upping the marines, the air force also launched a cross-promotional effort with the Fox network television show Prison Break. Visitors to its MySpace profile page were offered five slick "rough cuts" of air force commercials on which to vote their preferences. The winning ad ran during the September 18 episode of the prison-escape drama.
The next day, in an abrupt about-face, the air force shut down its MySpace page over "concerns that association with inappropriate content might damage the service's reputation". As Madtes told the Air Force Times, "The danger with MySpace is we got to the point where we weren't real comfortable with the potential for inappropriate content to be posted [on the page of] a friend of a friend. We didn't want to be associated with that and tarnish our reputation."
Earlier, the US Army also expressed reservations over MySpace, and canceled an advertising contract with the site after just one month, because of reports of "child predators approaching youths via the site". In fact, MySpace is entangled in a US$30 million lawsuit brought by a "14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by another user of MySpace.com".
In a recent speech, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called attention to an incident in which a man "used MySpace.com to lure an 11-year-old girl into having illicit sexual relations", and the House of Representatives passed a measure to ban MySpace.com and other social-networking sites from schools and libraries, by a lopsided 410-15. |
