MySpace and sticking it to the man

The purpose of rock & roll is sticking it to The Man - so sayeth Jack Black's Dewey Finn in School of Rock. Wise words. Similarly for the Internet. With hackers as its folk heroes and anarchy at the heart of its principle of distributed organisation, the Internet has always been about sticking it to The Man. Users and commentators cheerfully, perhaps wilfully, confuse the probabilistic algorithms of Google (LongTail) and the open editing of Wikipedia (Guardian) with democracy, and for as long as I've been watching them the debates surrounding citizen journalism and Dan Gillmor's "We Media" have taken a (wholly justified) glee in the redistribution of media power from the centre to the edges. My "widening gyre" is, perhaps, just a less elegant way of saying "sticking it to The Man".

Now over at Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp sees a recent dip in MySpace's traffic as the beginning of a fundamental decline. I think he's right. The virtual anarchy of MySpace was never really compatible with the needs of a high-profile, publicly-traded company to give the appearance of shielding its younger users (WSJ) from the hypothetical harm of unsupervised virtual play.

Danah Boyd's excellent paper on the popularity of MySpace shows us that  children like MySpace because it gives them a (virtual) public space in which to socialise free, however illusorily, of adult scrutiny. The problem for MySpace now is that a plethora of mainstream media articles about the site and its potential dangers for younger users have brought it to the attention of even relatively technically-illiterate parents and teachers, and MySpace's young users are perfectly well aware of the fact. The illusion of freedom from scrutiny has been broken. Of course, some people are only on MySpace for its original hook, the music. Some won't care about the illusion of scrutiny. This isn't - as Scott Karp says in a later update to his post - anything like the death of MySpace. However...an important illusion has been broken, and I think the site is going to hemorrhage users at the lower end of the demographic for a little while yet.

Finally, Steve Yelvington opines that newspapers can play in the social networking space. Of course we can. But we will need to learn from the rather expensive mistake I believe News Corp has made with MySpace. This is not a space in which to be (or be mistaken for) The Man.