MySpace

Seeing as how I do not have a Myspace nor have I ever seen anyone else’s, I was not sure what to expect when I began looking at the different profiles. As I started to search through various profiles of both genders I quickly began to realize that there is a big difference in the way girls design their pages compared to boys. The majority of the girls filled their profiles with lots of colors, designs, pictures of friends, favorite quotes, and much more. The layout was usually very flashy and provocative with many things going on at once. Girls seemed to try and fill every single space with something. On the contrary, the profiles of boys were very simple, with usually very few pictures, and only one or two main colors. Another substantial difference that I noticed was the pictures that each gender used as their main profile picture. The constant theme with the boys was to look as macho and as detached as possible, whereas the girls were shown full of smiles, having a good time.
These profiles are definitely a form of visual rhetoric because as you look at these different pages you can see what that person is interested in and what they like. It is easy to tell what type of traits each gender is trying to portray. For example, the background of one profile was of the movie The Notebook. This person was clearly trying to state that they were fond of that movie. You can learn a lot about someone, you have never even met, by just looking at their Myspace profile for five minutes. This is not always a good thing, because the person they portray on their web page may be completely different than the person they are in real life.