Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

Henry Jenkins runs in my rut!

MySpace is described as "crowded, trashy, creepy, uneducated, immature, predators, crazy" while Facebook was praised as "selective, clean, trustworthy, educated, authentic, college, private." In other words, MySpace takes on values we associate with inner city slums, while Facebook is tied to the values one might associate with a gated community.

(Emphasis mine.)

To be fair: I've visited MySpace exactly once and it looked like it might be fun for people who go in for heavy social networking. Which is not me. I also visited LinkedIn once and ran immediately into Guy Kawasaki's page and have been too intimidated to go there again.

To be even more fair: I used to live in New York City. I like to explore and travel, and you can find almost anything in New York by taking the subway and walking. (In The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, subway, bus, and walking. On Staten Island, mostly bus, because that subway is a single line unconnected to the rest of the world.) You can at any moment characterize almost any neighborhood in Manhattan, including the Very Upper East Side, the way MySpace is characterized above.

That is exactly why everyone wants to live in The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. (Yes, I am thinking of a certain editor who, offered the editorship of Some Prestigious Magazine, turned it down because he couldn't get (or couldn't be guaranteed, I forget which) an apartment with a doorman in Manhattan.)

Let me drop a small secret here: Many people live in Manhattan without doormen. Even in ritzier nabes.

The other thing is that very few people believe that Facebook's "values" are New York virtues. New York is proudly heterodox (there may even be New Yorkers who'd sympathize with that guy Rocker) in all matters. Not terribly clean, either, although Montréal on Sunday morning is also grungy. Authentic, sure, but more in (ha!) a MySpace way. And the "educated...college" thing is a legacy from Facebook's origins, which probably means smart trolls.

By the way? Facebook has claimed rights to members' materials. That's not what I'd call "trustworthy."

Oh, yes. New York over Smoke Rise forever.