Stalker Space

Considering the fact that I am obsessed with facebook, it was interesting seeing how myspaee worked. I have never seen any myspace profiles but I was aware that myspace was a hot spot for online predators. The first profile I looked at was of an eighteen-year-old girl. The picture she had posted was extremely provocative, her music was about sex, and it explicitly said that in with lyrics, and she loved beer and Bacardi. After looking at her profile it just went downhill. I have never seen so many girls publicize themselves this way online. Their profiles were crammed full of pictures with friends, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, screen names, and even how much money they make in a year. No wonder it is so easy for stalkers to find their prey! Myspace is a wonderful place of visual rhetoric; you can look at a person’s profile and just read it once and know more about them than possibly one of their friends. The girls have kept their audience in mind by considering their only audience to me males. Most of the girl’s music represented them because it was rap or bringing sexy back, and it matched their profiles perfectly. Not all of the girl profiles I looked at were provocative; many were extremely girly and cute with quotes from The Notebook, Dawson’s Creek, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They were able to show their true selves to both female and male audiences and they had more friends than the provocative girls did. But it was a completely different story when I looked at male’s profiles.
The male profiles I looked at were particularly simple. They just wrote a paragraph about themselves had their favorite rap song playing and maybe some funny quotes from Wedding Crashers. Most boys had pictures of themselves without shirts on trying to show every possible muscle that they might possess. These boys usually were full of themselves and they wrote it in their profile. Other boys had goofy pictures of themselves; one was in a wiener costume, others had pictures of them in togas or other random costumes that they most likely wore to a party. I think that even though the boy’s profiles were simpler, they could express themselves easily without all the glitter and glam that the girls used. Each gender showed exactly what society would want. The girls had “girly,” pretty webpages, and the boys tried to show off how masculine they were. Of course society most likely would like girls to be girly in a non-provocative way, but this is how these girls wanted to show themselves off. Myspace is the perfect place to show who you are, but you can also ruin your reputation.