Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me

The media has a polite way of taking everything and making it seem negative. Flaws get exploited. But did the basic concept of social networking already come pre-packaged with errors?

It seems that when a story breaks these days we have more than one way of gathering information. Why spend hours and days calling up your contacts when you could go online and get all the information from the primary source. Straight from the horses mouth, so to speak. This is exactly what happened with the story of ashamed New York governer Eliot Spitzer. After being publised in the New York Times as Spitzers’ regular call-girl, switching on the computer and tracking down Ashley Youmans seemed like the best thing to do. Miss Youmans’, now Ashley Alexandre Dupree is being praised and slated simultaneously by one million viewers a day who visit her MySpace page. We have now learned she is someone who is “all about my music” and that she moved to New York in hope of a music career. A million Hollywood movies in one line. “Girl moves to New York. Fails as musician. Sleeps with governer. Becomes famous for something you wouldn’t really want to.” Expect it in cinemas by next Summer.

 Ever since MySpace hit the interweb on a global scale a few years ago, the press are constantly reporting the mishaps of these networking websites. They have become emersed into our culture, so it is not surprising there has been focus on them. It isn’t always major news; you’ll probabaly find it tucked within the tech or finance pages of a broadsheet. In those crevices you may find information on the latest update on who has bidded for facebook and how its owner is the youngest billionaire in the world in a study published recently. In fact, I wouldn’t blame Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson in their part of all of this; they took an idea and ran with it, this shows initiative. What doesn’t is the mindless bullying that is accepted when you could be anyone, anywhere using personal information against them. It’s a constantly open door that someone needs to shut. But don’t look at me – I have a MySpace and a Facebook page.