Separated at MySpace

I have noticed that my list of MySpace friends doesn't grow linearly. You can't just go to the last page of your "friends" to see who's added themselves to your train.

New "friends" seem to get added and sorted at random. I am assuming it is a ruse used to maximmize pageviews and thusly ad revenue. Still, it lends itself for some unplanned and quite humorous comingly of people who may have never met outside your list.

Like the case of the smiley death-match between Hanifah Walidah, DJ, video producer & master networker extraordinaire; and Barack Obama, presidential rock star. Who has the biggest grin, illest fashion sense and flawless-ler skin? You decide!

Then there's the war of the geeks. There's the policy geek and anti-war powerhouse, Senator Russ Feingold. On the other corner is Jason, "i am lawgeek, hear me roar" Schultz.

I think I heard somewhere that you are attracted to the same 3 or 4 people that made indelible impressions on you early in life, including your parents. If you look at my list of friends, you definitely find a narrative there.

Michael Turk wrote for TechPresident.com about this phenomenon. In What your friends say about you he looks at the negative side of these associations :

In e-mail lists, the campaign knows almost nothing about the person on the other end of the address. They may have a bit of information regarding interests, but little else.

Social Networking friends, however, link through to a profile that may be unsuitable for children, often overshares personal information, and might make voters question a candidate's judgment about his/her associates.

Since John Edwards is probably doing more social network outreach than any other candidate, I pulled up his MySpace page. A quick click through to John Edwards' friends list reveals a porn photographer, a playboy model, a guy who calls himself "Sir Bitchmaster" and enough T & A to make Larry Flynt proud.

Just a very few short years ago, allegations that a candidate cavorted with playboy models, people in the porn industry or misogynists would have sunk a campaign. Today it seems to be written off as routine.

All of this makes me ask if that old adage my parents instilled holds true in the digital age. Can you judge a candidate by the company he keeps online?

His assessment though, stays on the surface on the mere labels; as if the appropriateness of a person's job description were enough to judge their character.

That's so 20th century.

The point of the web 2.0 revolution is that online, Identity (and along with it prestige, reputation, validation) is a Nietzschean mesh of actions and relationships, not a thing-in-itself.

Journalists and political consultants are too simple to understand the value of anything outside of immediate markers like "pageviews", "unique visitors" or "friends".

If I were a presidential candidate, more than a blogger or a pollster, I'd probabaly hire an anthropologist and a semiotician.

I would hire someone along the lines of a danah boyd and would have them go all over the net scouring blogs, forums, social networking sites like MySpace and social networking engines like Flickr, LiveJournal and YouTube.

I'd have the reader of human and the reader of human communications, deconstructing, "breaking down" for the campaign the mythopoetics, the psychographics and social dynamics as expressed through these meshed profile pages. I would most certainly try to find all the connectors, the repeated faces or links that appear throughout the scores of profile pages and blogs.

I would use these 'separated by MySpace' moments to look at how my world, as a public figure, is being meshed.

There is no amount of money that could buy that kind of information. That's where the value of these networks lie. Not just on the mailing list or popularity numbers. The gold is in the still-to-be-discovered meshes of influence that are the foundation to one's power base.

This article was first published at culturekitchen.com