“Myspace reminds us of our younger selves – our first faltering attempts to define ourselves online – and we’re embarrassed by the memory. Our scorn for Myspace is really sublimated shame for the people we used to be.”

Luke Lewis in The Guardian today

I was on the MySpace bandwagon as much as anyone back in 2004-2006. I saved a copy of one of the carefully constructed, final incarnations of my profile, and I’m pleased I did. The expressive and haphazard nature of MySpace matched perfectly with the messy confusion of adolescence. The appeal of tidy, quick-to-load and uniformed Facebook profiles matched our desire to grow up. We moved to a place where free expression is valued, but is not allowed to spill over the virtual lines and boxes in a wall of clashing music, sound effects and jumpy graphics. The difference is the difference between childhood and maturity and adulthood in a microcosm. I don’t for one minute want to go back to the muddled melodrama of teenage life and angst. But it’s a shame that the teenagers of today and the future will probably now miss out on the free-for-all sandbox of sculpting their personalities via a MySpace profile that they can wince at seven years later.

Picture: An excerpt from my MySpace profile in 2006