Finger on the Pulse with A.J. Swish
MySpace Allows Internet Denizens to Do Some Things and Say Some Other Things!
by A.J. Swish, Finger on the Beat of the Pulse
Microsoft. Amazon. Email. Prodigy. Just a few of the companies that have cashed in bigtime on the runaway success of the Internet (or World Wide Web). And today, there’s a new force that’s on the tongues of anyone who’s anyone on the Internet: MySpace. All around the country, people are using this site to do things to each other and see other things that other people may have done at some point in time. The site boasts a lot of people who call themselves “members” and their community is growing all the time. So I asked, “What’s the buzz?” and “logged on” to MySpace.
I typed in “http://www.MySpace.com” into my Internet browser and took in the front page. There were a lot of words there, and some pictures too. The page was loaded with “HyperLinks,” or things that you click that bring you to other Internet places. It was quite a SITE indeed!
I was lost, so I enlisted the help of my teenaged daughter Marissa (MySpace username “lapdanzmama1992”). She told me the first thing I had to do was create a profile. I decided on “NewsManAJ,” but my daughter told me it was already taken, so we settled on “OldManSwish22.”
Now, we had to fill out a detailed survey. In it, I chose everything from interests to tastes in the arts to personal details. My daughter, accidentally she maintains, said that I was interested in having a casual fling with some young men, but this was just a minor detail. I was on my way!
A typical MySpace browser-view
Now that I was on my own, I quickly set about exploring my new world. I started with my daughter’s profile. Her page was full of photographs of her and her friends drinking soda pop out of cans labeled as beer, as a joke, she told me, those incorrigible kiddies! I decided the best way to start would be by electronic-speaking to one of her friends, so I chose the first one on her list. “Hey, little girl,” my message began. “How are you?” She sent me a response offering to “fluff” my “boner,” which my daughter told me is cyber-speak for “look at my page.” I enthusiastically accepted!
My new I-Friend set up a meeting behind a local gas station that I was to keep secret even from Marissa. I thought the whole thing a bit strange, but hoping for some honest input on my new “profile,” I went anyway. Unfortunately, there was some kind of mix-up. I was greeted not with my new buddy, but with several police officers telling me I was under arrest for soliciting sex with a minor. I tried to flee the scene, but they caught me and threw me to the ground and called me a pervert. I'll spare you the details of my trial, plea and community service, but needless to say, it changed my perceptions of MySpace forever. I thought I was having a fun time doing things like the kinds of things that one does on this place. But in fact, I was doing several other terrible things, or so I was told. The message here is to be careful of the things you do on that page, because sometimes you think you’re doing one thing but you’re really doing some other thing, whatever that is. And when you do those things, that’s when you know you’re in a lot of trouble.
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I'm guessing the authorities will be contacting me again shortly. -The Editor
