The Demise of the MySpace Era.

In this day and age we have less and less physical contact with our fellow humans. In fact, to make up for the lack of contact we rely on advanced technology to “stay in touch” with friends, family, colleagues, and furthermore use it as a way to make more friends, connections, and even dates. To make matters worse there are things out there such as: right click, save as, and Photoshop that can create a fiasco out of the most minute of things, like a picture. As soon as you post a picture on Facebook, Twitter, or one of the countless other social networking sites, there is no way of making sure someone else doesn’t “steal” your photo from your page. For those of you who don’t use social networking sites many other sites such as: Flickr, Image shack, and Photo bucket allows access to the general public to look at your pictures. These sites go as far as allowing search engines to filter through your pictures, and if the caption happens to match something someone is looking for, they most likely will be able to see your picture.

It seems as though there is no real way to protect oneself from this kind of subtle, yet privacy evading attack. This kind of defamation, if you will became quite an issue and even created a trend of what is now referred to as “internet celebs”. For instance in the MySpace era, (yes it was an era has now passed) someone could easily save your photo and post it on an entirely different profile page and claim to be you. Many young teens, who were considered attractive to a large amount of other kids hence the ridiculous amount of "friends" to prove it, had their pictures stolen. Things got so out of hand that MySpace had to try and create some sort of security measurement in which a person could get their “fakes” deleted. However the process itself was a bit tedious:

1.) you had to retrieve your unique user ID number.

2.) you had to write the number on a piece of paper and take a picture of yourself holding up the paper with the number on it.

3.) you had to send the picture in a message to a customer service rep. of MySpace and hope that you had done enough to prove that you are who you say you are and get the “fakes” deleted.

However, the fakes got smart thanks to programs like Photoshop, which facilitates professional editing in a comprehensive fashion for the masses. Soon enough minors all over America began to abandon the site. MySpace had created an even more insecure world for those who had just began trusting the internet, by creating a network where you were never really sure of whom you were speaking to. Victims of the MySpace fakes eventually quit trying to prove who they were.



Eventually, MySpace wised up and created an option where you could make one’s page private but it was too late. The fervor for many other sites had begun to catch on with the original MySpace clients and newcomers to the social networking wave. This in turn converted MySpace into a relic of the boom of the social networking era.
For a site that allowed one to be as unique as you’d like by allowing you to manipulate everything from layout design to music. It is odd to see MySpace lose its fervor to sites like Facebook and Twitter, sites that are infamous for their limited word count, and uniform layouts despite the small tweaks here and there.

Aisha