A Gout Out for the Mix Tape Universe

Writing Assignment #10

“One thing they don’t teach in school is outer-space don’t care for you.”
-The Briefs

I’m sitting in the Metro computer lab bored and upset stomach laden. I peer over to my left and see an attractive blond girl typing up stuff on her computer. Being the nosy computer neighbor that I am, I look at her screen in attempt to get a fill for her person/personality. I see she has a rather cliché site consuming the computer’s monitor and in turn it’s probably a site that consumes not only the monitor but much of her time. It’s called MySpace and it’s this immensely strange behavior that many of my peers get involved in. To me this trend of computer socialization is scarier then any TV box or game consul’s effects on our lives. The TV lacks interaction and at times is used a stimulus for tangible social interaction. I don’t own a T.V. but the last two years (when my schedule wasn’t as hectic) I would make a Tuesday commute to my grandmother’s house to watch our favorite new show, The Apprentice. We would view our weekly dose of brutal firing and have conversation based around the show and or time would venture into more quality topics. Game consuls like Play Station are big time wasters in my peers’ lives. They are interactive and addicting. From my experience with consul world “gamers” are more social creatures then most would expect. Mostly, they conjugate together in the unified cause of gamming. Where a so-called popular kid conjugates to party to get fucked and fucked up…Gamers do the same only their conjugations are to get buzzed off of gallons of Mountain Dew and to hone their shooting skills on Halo. Once again, this gaming builds tangible relationships through tangible human interaction. The computer on the other hand, is the devil. Networking sites like Friendster and MySpace are mushrooming everywhere on cyberspace. People don’t give out phone numbers anymore, they give out MySpace links. My peers don’t even stop for small talk anymore. I’ve witnessed a few occasions where people say, “I’ll MySpace you.” What? People wont even stop to chat about how nice the weather is?…they’d rather save those impersonal exchanges for an even more impersonal medium of cable wires and flat (like flat characters of a plot) screens. The computer has a critical difference between its competing electric life suckers…it’s not only socially interactive but it spawns an inanimate social interaction that competes with human contact. Everyday more and more people get entangled in the game of MySpace. I call it a game because of the competitive notch-on-the-belt resume human quality it caters to. People are obsessed with collecting these pseudo-cyberspace friends. I look over to my left and 45 minutes later the same girl is socializing away on her MySpace account. The strange thing is, I bet if I walked up to her right now and asked her to a cup of coffee in the motiveless vein of meeting someone new…she would be uninterested and too busy with her cyberspace interactions. Or I’m sure not even going that far. If I was to chat with her she would be annoyed because I was breaching on her friend’s time. Oh well, I can always walk up and ask to MySpace her.

The ironic thing is…that tangible human interaction is becoming the strange behavior. Maybe, in the other section of your psychology class you will read a paper from a girl stating that a strange observable experience she had was, “some guy tried to talk to me in the computer lab. That’s what MySpace is for…duh.”