The destruction of Myspace blogs is akin to destroying Penn Station in 1963 – making way for the new by destroying the old. Both were abhorrent.
By Ian Milligan
In 1963, despite community opposition, New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was torn down. It was an age of modernism, old being wiped away for new. Afterwards, some of the sails went out of that movement: there was renewed interest in architectural preservation, added hesitation when it came to the wholesale destruction of our past.
Last week, a similar event happened. MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple millions of people.
Remember MySpace? Before Facebook, there was MySpace: the world’s most visited social media site between 2005 and 2008. Users created heavily customized pages – wags enjoyed making fun of the garishness of many of them, as opposed to the sterile and standardized world of Facebook – and it was a popular blogging platform. For many young people, only a few years ago, MySpace was the centre of their social world.
So it was a shock when, without warning (even Yahoo! (no fan of history) gives warnings when they shut down their websites), MySpace decided to modernize their website and destroy those blogs along the way. MySpace is all about the new now: launching with a new cool, funky commercial by a cult photographer; focusing on streaming music and mobile applications; and blanketing television networks who have young audiences, from Comedy Central to MTV to ESPN.
Let me say this again: MySpace destroyed history.
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