MySpace Stole My Soul.

*Author's note: I wrote this for a class in the fall of 2006. All facts were accurate as of the due date, but may not be anymore!

MySpace stole my soul. It’s true.

When I signed up for an account more than a year ago, I didn’t anticipate the price I would pay. After all, the registration page claimed signing up was free.

Many months later, I can’t go a single day without logging in to check for new friends and new comments. Sometimes I can’t go a single hour. MySpace stole my soul. It is controlling the transmission. It controls the horizontal. It controls the vertical.

Indeed, MySpace cast its spell over our society like something straight out of “The Outer Limits.” Alexa Internet, a search engine that also publishes a list of the most-visited Web sites, reports MySpace the fourth most-visited English-language Web site. Only Yahoo, MSN, and Google are ranked higher. Globally, MySpace is number five – a popular Chinese search engine sneaked into the number four spot.

Founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, MySpace is a networking Web site that allows users to design a profile page, find and add friends, send messages and comment on other’s pages. MySpace also provides options to establish and join common interest groups and create band pages featuring songs that can be added to profiles.

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. purchased MySpace and its parent company, Intermix Media Inc., in July for $580 million, according to CNN.com. Anderson and DeWolfe stayed on as president and CEO, where they continue making improvements and developing new features for their lucrative enterprise.

MySpace surpassed 20 million registered users this past summer, according to CNN.com. On average, 230,000 new accounts are created each day. Numbers like those beg the question: Is there anyone left who’s not on MySpace?

The answer is yes. There is at least one person not on MySpace, and that would be my friend Brian. Brian is the poster child for the MySpace backlash. He shuns the site and ridicules the people who use it.

“Why do I want to put all that information out there for everyone to see? I don’t need the government and the FBI checking up on me all the time.”

Brian might be slightly paranoid. But he brings up an excellent point. Anyone can access the information posted, including potential employers. According to an online article from The New York Times, searching the Internet and MySpace has become commonplace for many employers. Applicants must be careful about what they disclose online, or risk losing out on a job.

Even so, as a member of the cult that is MySpace, I find it hard to imagine how Brian functions without it. How does he know how many friends he has? Where does he discover the latest music by the latest bands? How does he receive validation as a person without a place for his friends to leave him misspelled and grammatically incorrect comments? In short, how does he communicate with the outside world?

I asked him this one night, as we sat in his living room. He just stared at me and blinked a couple times.

“What do you think we’re doing right now?”

He had a good point. But it’s really hard to care when you no longer have a soul.

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