Words By Zoe Zorka
As America’s social and political climate continues to become more and more fractured by the day, nowhere is this more evident than on social media. Once an innovative platform for friends and family to connect, Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram have become the new battleground for the first cyberwar.
One can’t help but yearn for the days of old- when the biggest controversy was who was in your Top 8, when you were judged not based on what media outlets you followed, but by your profile song, and angst was expressed in short blog posts against a hyperblinding, visually assaulting HTML background.
But alas, time waits for no man. Or woman. (Or nongender and/or gender-fluid individuals.)
The MySpace we all knew and loved (and sometimes loved to hate) is gone, and much like a middle age beauty queen sitting alone at a bar waiting to be noticed, what’s left in its place it but a shell of its former HTML-coded sparkly glory.
Armed with little more than a password that hasn’t changed in a decade and a MacBook that’s still under warranty, I ventured into the desolate graveyard of MySpace to see if there might be any signs of life on the once-great social media behemoth.
Upon logging in, the first thing that I noticed was that there was nothing about me to be found on the home screen. The dull, grid-like structure featured little more than recycled pop culture and celebrity news, appearing much like Yahoo’s version of Nordstrom Rack. The generic Google ads Interspersed throughout didn’t even appear to be trying. An ad for Office Max sat idly next to a story about the Bonaroo lineup, almost as if the Google algorithm knew that placement on the site was a fruitless endeavor.
The sidebar navigation was only slightly better than the first WordPress site that I build in high school with categories for “featured,” “music,” “videos,” and “people” parsing out secondary source content.
Finally, I saw the “You,” which I assumed meant me. Or a blank slate of who I could be if I cared enough to posts a 1024-character status update. Gone were all of my former posts, my music selections, my mini-blogs, and any sign of who I once was.
Some photos were still available in my stream, but only those from late 2007 on.
In 2013, MySpace apparently migrated from “classic MySpace” to its current state of apathy. As I scrolled through old albums filled with an abundance of self-tanner and questionable fashion choices (you may have forgotten your Ed Hardy phase, but MySpcace hasn’t), the whole thing felt deeply impersonal- as if I was just looking at an old Shutterfly album, not the place where I used to come to express myself when I was too shy to talk to people in person.
After dodging the random pop-up ads with the dexterity that Roy Moore dodges fathers in a Forever 21 store, I managed to click on my profile, which by this point was stripped of the pink Coach logo background I last put up in 2009. In its place was a background featuring a rusted trailer surrounded by haze, haphazardly parked in what appears to be the California mountains.
The only thing left were six of my Top 8 friends: my sister, ex-boyfriend, and a handful of random people I used to know forever immortalized in my digital archives, frozen in time as the 2008 version of myself remain trapped in time, unaware that in ten years this would be the benchmark that measured the evolution (or devolution) of our digital society.
I contemplated deleting my account, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. But I did say a quick prayer and RIP to my youth- and vowed to find all of my Ed Hardy and burn it.
