hangin in myspace

I've been seduced by yet another online community. Myspace.com is a place where people who are either too lazy or too dim or both (like myself) to learn how to make a proper web page can create a personal profile with photos, a list of interests, a blog, and other features. You make "friends" in this cybervillage, and then you make comments about one another. From what I've seen so far, the comments tend to be pithy and cryptic. With the help of third-party software, myspace denizens can decorate their cyber-pads. So here's mine. Go for it. You know you want to.

By the way, surely you've noticed the way that everything related to computers and the Internet is becoming increasingly possessive in nature. The word my now precedes just about anything related to my computer. I save music files in a folder labeled My Music, while photos are stored in My Pictures, both of which are stored in My Documents. Everything is, of course, organized on My Computer. When I surf the web, I navigate to myspace, or My Yahoo!, or, to check anything related to my work, to myfresnostate.com. All this territoriality seems a little excessive; aren't we protesting a bit too much? Is the ownership of anything on my computer somehow disputable? Do I have to be reminded that the Yahoo portal page I see when I open my browser is mine? And how is it mine? I suppose the age of digital information has forced us to realize that issues of possession and self-possession are very cloudy. What we own and who we are are very much up for grabs. Perhaps this my-mania collective self-delusion: an attempt to continue to believe that we are self-contained individuals who can exert a measure of control over ourselves and all that surrounds us.

Or maybe my is just a catchy, cute prefix to all things cyber.