Reality And Its Simulation - Why MySpace Can Censor You

My friend Jamie recently had a run-in with the MySpace censorship patrol, detailed in his blog. He used the word "lameass" in the headline of his own MySpace profile. For those who don't know the headline is that little bit in quotes right next to your photo. Knowing Jamie it was a witty, self-deprecating little quip intended to disarm and ingratiate; nothing malicious or hateful. But "lameass" must have sent up a red flag over at Rupert Murdoch's Noodlekadoodle Kiddie Police Command and Control Center. The censor-bots scrambled into attack mode and when Jamie came back the next day, his clever headline was removed from his profile faster than the KGB could airbrush a Soviet dissident out of a photograph. Being a writer and a student of the media arts Jamie was understandably pissed-off by this. What about all that First Amendment stuff?

Since I am by training an architect, I'll use spatial terms when talking about the Internet. It's much more convenient than describing it as a "Big Truck" or a "Series of Tubes"...

So what has been happening lately in cyberspace and in meatspace? Is there a parallel in the real world that can help us get a handle on exactly how it is that MySpace and services like it have so quickly and easily gotten such power over our communications so quickly?

In the US, it turns out that this same thing has been happening in the real world since the 1960's. Up until then, the small town mainstreet was the hub of daily life. People went downtown to work, shop, eat, and socialize. Main street was the very symbol of the idea of community. Words like civic, civil and citizen were commonplace back then. There was a feeling of social cohesion, a shared culture, and an idea of what it meant to be "American." Now, certainly a bit of this erosion can be attributed to the fragmentation of the homogenous white culture into a far more multicultural and less homogenous milieu. But that has been a good thing. Remember that this country absorbed wave after wave of immigrants before the 1960s yet still had that sense of social fabric until then. So what was it then?

Two things led to the erosion of our sense of the collective public space; the rise of automotive car culture and the suburbs. One need only listen to the song "Cars" by Gary Numan to get a feel for the alienation which the automobile slowly introduced into our culture since its insinuation into our culture.

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days
In cars

Here in my car
The image breaks down
Will you visit me please
If I open my door
In cars

Here in my car
I know I've started to think
About leaving tonight
Although nothing seems right
In cars

I know I've started to think
I know I've started to think

The car puts up a barrier between us and those traveling around us. There is a decidedly different feeling in US cities in which there is mass transit and a walking culture. Bumping into those around us fosters communication between individuals; a continual negotiation which takes place between strangers. In cars, this is taken away by the traffic system with its lights and signs eliminating the need to think or communicate with those around us. It is the replacement of the informal with protocol.

Even before the automobile was the mainstay of American culture, alienation coupled with a sense of entitlement combined to create the suburbs. During the Industrial revolution, cities were horrifically cramped and polluted places in which to live. Mass transit (trolleys) let people escape the population density they loathed in favor of a bizarre approximation of the idyllic rural lifestyle promised by the country; the suburbs. As the countryside surrounding the cities began to fill up with middle- and upper-class families, it became apparent that the very thing which made it appealing was being stamped out by the increasing population migration. The model of the suburb as we know it today was created as a middle ground between the completely autonomous rural life and the urban life which required the sacrifice of a great deal of control over ones environment. The result is a further loss of control. By plugging into the suburban framework of neighborhoods and shopping centers, one tacitly accepts this way of life which permits no competing alternatives.

These same forces are at work on the Internet today. When the Internet experienced its first population boom in the early-to-mid 1990's, there were very few "services" as we know them today. There were no formalized search engines. You got from one homepage to another through an ad hoc system of links. This is why so many websites still have "Links" pages; back in the day it was the only way to get from one place to another. In order to find new places, one "surfed" from homepage to homepage in search of something new. This created that same sense of a small community that the original mainstreets of the United States once had; coexistence with some degree of mutual tolerance producing something greater than the sum of its parts. There was no expectation of privacy for the information on your homepage. Just like on a city sidewalk or a subway, if you posted an image on your website you were putting it out there for all the world to see.

Over time, the population of the Internet grew and the existing lack of a system became unwieldy. It was then that Yahoo! was born out of the graduate program at Stanford. (Anyone else remember http://www.stanford.edu/~yahoo ?) It was the first attempt to impose a hierarchy on what had until then been completely centerless. The map, when used almost exclusively as the sole navigational device, begins to dictate the growth of the territory. Simply by existing Yahoo! had gained an immense amount of power over the content of the Internet. People went to the content it listed far more than they went to the content it did not.

This was the first step in the direction away from an anarchistic framework towards a more centrist one, the slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Yahoo! was not doing anything malicious, of course, it is just the nature of power and control through organization.

The ultimate suburban form is the shopping mall. The indoor, hermetically-sealed, self-contained, private Enclave of Capitalism sort of mall. When mall culture took hold of the suburban US, an insidious effect began to happen. The mainstreet shopping districts began to dry up. A prime example of this is near my old stomping grounds; Birmingham, Michigan. Downtown Birmingham was a thriving, although incredibly gentrified mainstreet shopping district. When Somerset Mall, an upscale shopping mall, sprang up four miles away, businesses started relocating to the mall. It's status as a destination quickly trumped that of downtown Birmingham. I can remember all the the For Rent signs everywhere. The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce scrambled to do everything they could to combat the mall's draw. Free parking for the first two hours in any parking structure, etc. In the end, they managed to make the transition to a functioning downtown through even more gentrification. But this outcome is where the Birmingham example becomes the exception instead of the rule. In most other communities shopping malls destroyed the existing mainstreets.

So, what is the problem the shopping mall? The difference is in power and control. Try holding a political demonstration inside your local mall. Try to take a camera, or better yet, a video camera and document passers by. Either activity will get you immediately escorted off the premises mall security. Malls aren't public. They are considered privately controlled spaces. Within those spaces you surrender many of the rights you expect to have in public the minute you walk in the door. For the same reason that the police cannot conduct a search of your private residence, they cannot protect your right to free speech within a mall. Everyone is a stakeholder in a public downtown, but only the company which owns the mall has a say over what goes on there.



MySpace is to the old school Internet what the suburban mall is to old time mainstreet. A mall shop owner has the convenience of a store whose parking lot and building are maintained by someone else. Just pay your dues and plug into the system. MySpace homepages are the same way; anyone can make them. You don't need to be a web designer. You don't need to know how to register a domain name or edit code. You just plug your information into the page and it's up and running. But you're inside Rupert Murdoch's mall. By participating, you tacitly agree to the rules of conduct which are whatever MySpace says they are. Your only recourse is to leave. The problem in doing so is that you lose the power of the malls connectivity. Only other web designers can figure out how to link to a homepage outside "the mall."

The truly insidious thing is how this erosion of our public spaces has come completely full circle and returned to the real world. Disney operates a private "town" in Florida called Celebration. It is not a real town, per se, but an entire town-like place which exists on privately owned land. None of the protections we expect in public places hold there. Anyone can be ejected for any reason. In order to lease a house there one must be approved and customization of that house can only take place within extremely strict parameters.


Celebration, Florida. A wholy owned subsidiary of Disney, Inc.

Celebration sounds like some science fiction nightmare, but really, it's the just the meatspace manifestation of the same ideals that drive MySpace. In Celebration, the mall has metamorphosed back into the downtown, only the most important component has been conveniently left out. Many of your civil rights no longer exist there because power and control no longer lie in the hands of the public but have been handed over to the corporations who control the mall. Don't let Disney or Rupert Murdoch take away your rights.