Bobo Porn

I guess David Brooks got tired of ruminating about the choices of feminists and who all those high-achieving women might marry since they seem unwilling to "marry down". Maybe Bobo is having problems in his own marriage and scouting out other possibilities, and having ruled out the Maureen Dowds of the world, he's decided to scout out younger pastures -- like MySpace:

Companionship isn't dead. Go to MySpace.com or Facebook or Xanga or any of the other online sites where people leave messages on the home pages of their friends and you'll see these great waves of praise and encouragement. People visit their friends' pages and drop lovebombs. There's scarcely a critical word about anyone or anything in the whole social network. It's just fervent declarations of friendship, vows to get together soon and memories of great times gone by.

Some sociologists worry that we're bowling alone, but these sites (MySpace has 20 million visitors a month) are all about community. They're commonly used by people in the new stage of life that's been created over the past few decades. They are in their early to mid-20's; they're out of school but have no expectation they should marry soon. They're highly mobile, half-teen/half-adult, looking for a life plan and in between the formal networks of school, career and family.

So they bond online with an almost desperate enthusiasm. The Web pages they create are part dorm-room wall, part bulletin board, part young person's society page. They post photos of favorite celebrities, dirty postcards and music videos. And there are tons of chug-and-grins: photos of the gang gripping beers at a bar, photos of the tribe chugging vodka on the beach, photos of the posse doing shots at an apartment. Scroll down the page and there are people falling over each other, beaming and mugging for the camera phone.

To get the attention of fast-clicking Web surfers, many women have posed for their photos in bikinis or their underwear or in Penthouse-parody, "I clutch my breasts for you" positions. Here's a woman in a jokey sadomasochistic pose. There's a woman with a caption: "Yes, I make out with girls. Get over it" - complete with a photo of herself liplocked with a buddy.

The girls are the peacocks in this social universe. Their pages are racy, filled with dirty jokes and macha declarations: "I'm hot and like to party. Why have one boy when there are plenty to go around?!" The boys' pages tend to be passive and unimaginative: a guy posing with a beer or next to a Corvette. In a world in which the girls have been schooled in sexual aggressiveness, the boys sit back and let the action come to them.

On most Web pages, there's a chance to list your favorite TV shows and books. And while the TV lists are long ("The OC," "Desperate Housewives," "Nip/Tuck," etc.) many of the book lists will make publishers suicidal: "Books! Ha! Me! What a joke! ... I think reading's ridiculous. ... I don't finish books very often but I'm attempting 'Smart Women Finish Rich.'... This is what I have to say about books (next to an icon of Bart Simpson's rear end)."

The idea on these sites is to show you're a purebred party animal, which leaves us fogies with two ways to see MySpace.

The happy view is that this is a generation of wholesome young people building nurturing communities and the smutty talk is just a harmless way of demarcating an adult-free social space. The dark view is that these prolonged adolescents are filled with earnest desires for meaningful human contact, but they live in a culture that has provided them with no vocabulary to create these sorts of bonds except through cleavage and vodka.

Yes, and Brooks reads Playboy for the articles, too.

What I know about Myspace is from having sat through a case study on the site's system architecture at the 2005 CFUNITED conference. I know it was developed with the infinitely-superior-to-ASP Cold Fusion. And I know that the site has grown by leaps and bounds and that its owner was recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which now makes it highly suspect. But while Brooks may be correct about the general content at Myspace, he's dead wrong about online life.

The claim that e-mail, online chat, instant messaging, and messageboards have somehow replace real live human contact has been made by Luddite columnists for nearly ten years now. But as someone who has been living la vida online for nearly ten years, I can safely say that for many people, being able to reach out and touch anyone in the world opens far more doors of human contact than it closes. Sure, there is the dark side of life online -- the sex chats, the fetishists, the pedophiles, the predators, the marital cheaters -- but for those of us NOT seeking out the dark side, which I think are MOST onliners, the virtual world is like the town square -- only much, much bigger.

My own life has been enriched immeasurably by people I've met online. I have friends with whom I've corresponded since 1998 with whom I'm still in touch. I have other online friends, including, but not limited to Gabriel and Mary Ann and Nat and Nick and Tami who have crossed over into real life. I have others, like Beth and Shelly and Shirley, whom I've met never or met just once, who I value as much as the friends I see regularly.

The fact of life at the current time is that most of us are too busy for real-world socializing. Getting together involves hours of time -- an afternoon or an evening. Messaging and e-mail allows for friendships on the go for people trying to earn a living and keep a roof over their heads -- people who otherwise would be just too damn tired to do anything social.

The kind of drive-thru social contact bemoaned by David Brooks in this absurd column isn't just the province of twenty-somethings. We might be uncomfortable with a structure that requires girls to post photos of themselves looking like porn actresses and being the sexual aggressors in order to be considered linkworthy. But to deny the enrichment value of an expanded social universe is just wrong-headed. And frankly, Brooks shouldn't knock it till he's tried it.

UPDATE: Heh. Looks like the Evil Empire is fucking with MySpace and the natives are getting restless:

Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites.

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts in online "blogs".

"This is soooo like Fox and News Corp to try and secretly seal our mouths with duct tape," wrote "Alex" to Blog Herald.

The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links.

However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding".

[snip]

"MySpace is supposed to be a personal forum!" wrote "makisha" at the blog site Supr.c.iliu.us. "Now it's owned by some corporation and it's being sensored [sic]! The beauty of it has been ruined. Better wise up MySpace or you're going to loose [sic] a good portion of your subscribers."

A spokesman for MySpace said it would not explain how the blocking of YouTube came about, nor how it was resolved, nor whether in future it would continue to block links to rival websites or censor messages between MySpace customers.

Meanwhile, somewhere in New York, David Brooks is snagging MySpace profile photos as fast as his little fingers can carry him.

(hat tip for the update: Atrios)