After spending 24 hours a day on her myspace page for seven years Jennifer finally broke away last Wednesday. This is the harrowing tale of an addiction so terrifying and mind boggling that it had me and other Squib reporters in tears.
Forget about real-life cults, being a ‘myspacer’ is fraught with more danger and brainwashing. An addiction that rules peoples lives 24 hours a day and becomes an unstoppable obsession.
“I would change my hairstyle and hair colour every day then take photos to submit to my thousands of friends so they could leave me a comment.” Jennifer sobs into her napkin.
After seven years of slave-like dedication to adding online friends she found out the hard way that in real life she actually did not have any friends. She had amassed a total of 653,000 myspace friends and joined 978 myspace groups but only has her 23 cats for company in real life.
“My day would start with me pm’ing my friends and writing them about what I did in the last hour or two. This would take me six hours a day solid and then I could have breakfast.”
Things got worse for Jennifer when she found an automatic ‘friend adder’ software on the internet, now she could add 5,000 myspace friends an hour just by clicking a button. To her this was an epiphany and enabled her to spend more time working on her myspacer haircut and myspace photo poses.
“The more friends I got the more power on myspace I got but it was all fake and my life was still lonely as hell.”
“If myspace was down for a few hours I would go crazy with pressing the refresh button until it was up again.”
This would sometimes go on for days at a time and Jennifer soon developed carpal tunnel syndrome which is caused by repetitive hand movements for long periods.
Her obsession with myspace culminated when she was walking in her local mall and started to go up to strangers to start adding them as friends. It seems that she had lost touch with reality and anyone with an ’emo’ look was a prime suspect to being a myspacer. The mental health officers were soon called and had her detained for forcibly trying to ‘add’ a young man into myspace when he in fact was an undercover police officer.
more ‘myspace’ shame
Murdoch’s media conglomerate which acquired ‘myspace’ last year is already raking in huge advertising revenue at the expense of the helplessly brainwashed ‘myspacers’.
They are so addicted and affected by the fake friends network that they do not have any lives outside of myspace.
Gallery of shame – selection of clone ‘myspacers’
You are seen to be a nobody by myspacers if you do not have a page and this peer pressure has caused many a teen to the brink of insanity as in the case of Jennifer.
She is now housed in a mental institution and still believes that her fellow inmates are ‘myspacers’.
Is there life after myspace?
The sad myspace generation of witless, crass, narcissistic, non-individualism is upon us. People lost in their little cliques and their insular illusions of grandeur, all flailing around in a soup of eternal banality.
Andy Warhol once suggested that everyone would get their 15 minutes of fame, unfortunately, he was correct and now it is a detriment to true fame that the ‘watering down’ has materialised to such a terrible level.
A generation lost amongst the fake and plastic ‘friend list’ and clone haircuts, the shallow and insipid banality of ignorance, the decline of individuality and rise of unwarranted narcissism.
