Thanks to Library Stuff for the heads-up... according to Andrew Keen, "MySpace is creating cultural narcissism in our young."

Well, I'm sorry Andrew, but I've got news for you. Ever since a teenage-angst-ridden kid has had access to a computer and an online audience (as I did in the early 90s), there's been cultural narcissism. Back then, we'd all be on out 2400bps modems, dialling in to multi-line (ie. anything from 2 to 8 phone lines!) Bulletin Board Systems (ah, those were the days), in the hope that there might be another teenage girl online to chat to. Interacting in real-time multi-line chat (ie. to the 2 or 3 other people that had dialled in to that BBS), whingeing about the frustrations of our angst-ridden lives on message boards, getting crushes on other regular BBS'ers, and occasionally gothing-up and meeting up in real-life, and hanging out at Flinder's Street Station, or going to Zone 3 in Bourke Street (above the Hoyts Cinemas).

Or maybe, once BBS's were replaced in the late 1990s by the early days of the internet, lurking newsgroups, moping about how nobody loves us, and logging into IRC, and chatting to (wow) up to dozens of other local kids. Things were a bit different, though. Weird. It wasn't like the comfortable, insular BBS days. There were a lot of people online at once, and whilst there were the dozen or so regulars who you'd already met up with at a video night, there were a lot of people that you didn't know. Still, you had your own posse, your own peers who could empathise with all the traumas of late adolescents, unrequited loves, student poverty, and so on.

Then the turn of the century came, and with it, blogging. Although it wasn't called that straight away. Back then, it was Livejournal or, as we cool kids called it, "LJ". It was the supplement to IRC. Sure, we all chatted, but a lot of our narcissistic pleasures moved onto LJ, and I've been as guilty as anybody of that (mine is "friends-locked", so don't bother looking for it). Just look at LJ Drama. It was the ultimate form of attention-seeking behaviour - the "I'm going to put it on the internet, and you can't stop me!" attitude.

Geocities had come and gone as a place for narcissistic publishing. Sure, websites are great, but they're not simply interactive enough.

By then, to put it bluntly, I'd gotten out and gotten a life. Some things came and went, and all of a sudden, it's all about MySpace. Yes, I have a MySpace, and I use it for networking. It's great for pop culture, and a lot of entertainers network through MySpace.

But has MySpace created a culture of narcissism amongst our youth? Hell no. I daresay there's been a culture of narcissism amongst our youth long before the internet was around.

More interestingly, in writing this rant, I'm coming to realise that Web 2.0 is far from anything spectacularly new. Elements of it have been around the internet long before it was ever known as the internet. Maybe, like the Lord of the Rings, it's just taken the wider community a long time to work out that geeky stuff can also be cool. :)