You can make toast with an iron, but you can't iron with a toaster.

WARNING: ADULTS ONLY!

 

You have to be really savy these days to be a responsible consumer. If you care at all who you're giving your money to or what you're supporting, you have to do a little research. Over at Rupert Murcoch's MySpace there is a public relations campaign underway. It's disguised as a socially responsibile action in response to the sexual predator scandals of late, but is really little more that the equivalent of fast-food nutrition labels - we already knew it was shit. In this case, as most others, it's corporate shit.

 

I think it's disconcerting when you examine the corporate entanglements of US businesses and the hypocricy of government regulation. Microsoft is forever having the "monopoly" finger pointed at them, but what about other monster conglomerates like the News Corp. Take a look at the list of what the it owns and operates:

 

Television
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Television Stations - Thirty-five televisions stations.

 

Journalism - Twenty-nine newspapers.

 

Publishing Companies - Forty-two.

 

Misc. -  Mushroom Records, MySpace.com and the National Rugby League.

And that's not a monopoly? How could you expect them to mind the store at MySpace when their store is practically the whole world? That they remove 200k objectionable profiles while 250k new users sign up every day is less than a token gesture of social responsibility. And then it was only done to placate the arousal of the media they don't own. And the media they do own is probably yours.

 

I have repeated numerous times here the Catch-22 of "otherwise objectionable" material. Everything you blog today could become otherwise objectionable material tommorrow, and thus be removed. Not even your username is really yours. The "My" in MySpace refers not to the individual, but to the corporation. And, possibly the "Mind" in Mindsay refers to "mind" as in "do what I say".

 

Fellow blogger-citizens, it may be prudent to consider you may as well be writing on a public wall somewhere. That wall is owned by someone who will eventually erase it, or sell the wall to another corporation. Mindsay is not a humanitarian organization. Do you think they built and run this service to make the world a better place? No! They have their own thinly disguised social-consciousness claims. It's a business, and I would venture to guess they would hope to make it a viable acquisition for a large corporation thus turning a profit. What is in the name is mostly $$$.

 

P.S. 

While News Corp.'s recently acquired MySpace.com is thriving in its current form, the media giant already is devising plans to make the site even stickier and more profitable, possibly by acquiring so-called 'Web 2.0' properties, enabling transactions between members and adding subscription offers.