Here's an interesting one... (Originally posted on MySpace on Feb 25, 2007)

This is gonna sound wierd, but I got this from GamaSutra's excellent "blogged out" column. This week column posts a link and excerpts from Clive Thompson's blog. It's basically a reposting of an article by Thompson's wife Emily Nussbaum from the Magazine NYMag. I'll just cut and paste the text posted on Gamasutra...but if your interested in the whole article, I suggest you click on the links. Pretty interesting thoughts about the culture gap created by Myspace, et al:

"Because the truth is, we're living in frontier country right now. We can take guesses at the future, but it's hard to gauge the effects of a drug while you're still taking it. What happens when a person who has archived her teens grows up? Will she regret her earlier decisions, or will she love the sturdy bridge she's built to her younger self—not to mention the access to the past lives of friends, enemies, romantic partners?

On a more pragmatic level, what does this do when you apply for a job or meet the person you're going to marry? Will employers simply accept that everyone has a few videos of themselves trying to read the Bible while stoned? Will your kids watch those stoner Bible videos when they're 16? Is there a point in the aging process when a person will want to pull back that curtain—or will the MySpace crowd maintain these flexible, cheerfully thick-skinned personae all the way into the nursing home?"

I know that when we were looking for Mastering Lab techs we looked up their MySpace pages. It didn't influence our choice in who to hire...but it did give us some background. I mean it'd make it pretty hard for someone to tell their kids not to smoke the "Devil's Weed" if there's a whole YouTube archive of their trip to Amsterdam...