Those young years can be hard ones. The
acne, the awkwardness, the angst. That may be one
reason, if you're between your early teens and
your mid-20s, you may already be making "friends"
in the cozy cyber-confines of MySpace.com, the
social networking website that bills itself as "an
online community that lets you meet your friends'
friends".
At MySpace, each user can create
a customized webpage or "profile", upload photos
(only from your best angle and then
Photoshopped to the hilt),
blog around the clock, and - most important of all
- court those "friends".
In an eerie
reflection of the very world many MySpace
scenesters undoubtedly plunge into cyberspace to
avoid, the measure of success at the site is how
much you can increase your page's popularity. You
do this by posting attention-grabbing content,
breathlessly soliciting other users, putting up
provocative pictures to attract attention, sending
out "bulletins" to your existing "friends" and
asking them to "whore" you out to their list of
friends. With its multimillions of "friends" to
garner, the site is wildly popular - and not just
for insecure teens, either.
MySpace has
become a magnet for those who want, for one reason
or another, to draw young eyeballs (and often
young pocketbooks). Colleges, corporate products
such as Toyota's Yaris and the Honda Element, even
fictional characters such as Ricky Bobby from the
movie Talladega Nights or fast-food outlet
Wendy's minimalist cartoon pitchman Smart, have
already gotten into the MySpace act.
In
August, the site hit a major milestone - 100
million profiles. Even including those
corporate-sponsored sites and fictional pages,
that's still a whole lot of would-be friends.
Recently, Fortune magazine reported that
MySpace, bought by Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch
in 2005 as part of a US$580 million deal, "passed
Google in terms of traffic" and now ranks second
only to Yahoo in page views with 1 billion daily.
Already "home to 2.2 million bands, 8,000
comedians, thousands of filmmakers and millions of
striving, attention-starved wanna-bes", the
magazine reported that, on a typical day, it signs
up 230,000 new users.
While the site's
meteoric growth might be slowing of late, it has
shown special skill in recruiting people since its
launch in 2003. In the same years that MySpace has
become an Internet superpower, the US Armed Forces
have sustained substantial losses.
Bogged
down in unpopular occupations of two countries
with no sign of victory in sight, the US military
has lowered its standards and now recruits, writes
Brad Knickerbocker in the Christian Science
Monitor, "more soldiers from the 'lowest
acceptable' category based on test scores,
education levels, personal background and other
indicators of ability".
Little wonder,
then, with 80% of MySpace users reporting they're
over 18 years old, that the military has set its
sights on occupying some virginal virtual
territory in its search for fresh-faced recruits
who might be thrown into the Afghan and Iraqi
breaches.
So the US Marine Corps launched
its MySpace profile. A thoroughly predictable
page, it boasts a streaming video that might best
be termed boot-camp-on-speed - complete with clips
of a stereotypical drill instructor barking out
commands and a bullet-cam speeding toward a target
on the rifle range.
The site even offers
downloadable desktop wallpapers, mainly Marine
Corps "anchor and globe" emblems or photos of
World War II-vintage marines. Conspicuously, there
isn't a modern image in sight in any way evocative
of the war in Iraq (deployment pressure from which
recently caused the corps to announce that it
would force reservists to return involuntarily to
duty because of a lack of volunteers).
By
July, according to an Associated Press report,
"430 people had asked to contact a marine
recruiter through the site ... including some 170
who are considered 'leads' or prospective marine
recruits". With Iraq sapping its strength, even
those modest figures must be music to Marine Corps
ears.
By mid-September, the marines
already had close to 21,000 MySpace "friends"
endorsing their page, just below the 22,000
garnered by the "unauthorized" Noam Chomsky page
and way below Yaris's 70,000. But a respectable
number nonetheless.
In August, not to be
left out, the US Air Force launched its own page.
Along with the already requisite downloadable
wallpapers, it offered youthful visitors the
opportunity to click to chat with an air force
"adviser". Colonel Brian Madtes, the air force
recruiting service's strategic communications
director, was blunt about the reasons in an
"interview" with the air force's own news agency:
"In order to reach young men and women today, we
need to be in tune and engaged in their circles.
MySpace.com is a great way to get the word out to
the public about the amazing things people are
doing in the air force."
One-upping the
marines, the air force also launched a
cross-promotional effort with the Fox network
television show Prison Break. Visitors to
its MySpace profile page were offered five slick
"rough cuts" of air force commercials on which to
vote their preferences. The winning ad ran during
the September 18 episode of the prison-escape
drama.
The next day, in an abrupt
about-face, the air force shut down its MySpace
page over "concerns that association with
inappropriate content might damage the service's
reputation". As Madtes told the Air Force Times,
"The danger with MySpace is we got to the point
where we weren't real comfortable with the
potential for inappropriate content to be posted
[on the page of] a friend of a friend. We didn't
want to be associated with that and tarnish our
reputation."
Earlier, the US Army also
expressed reservations over MySpace, and canceled
an advertising contract with the site after just
one month, because of reports of "child predators
approaching youths via the site". In fact, MySpace
is entangled in a US$30 million lawsuit brought by
a "14-year-old girl who says she was sexually
assaulted by another user of MySpace.com".
In a recent speech, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales called attention to an incident
in which a man "used MySpace.com to lure an
11-year-old girl into having illicit sexual
relations", and the House of Representatives
passed a measure to ban MySpace.com and other
social-networking sites from schools and
libraries, by a lopsided 410-15.
This
summer, an army sergeant based in Fort Drum, New
York, was caught in a sting operation soliciting a
sheriff's detective, posing as a 15-year-old girl
on MySpace, for sex. He pleaded guilty to
"criminal solicitation and attempted rape in the
third degree".
Despite these developments
and the air force's hasty withdrawal, the army has
decided to embrace MySpace in a bigger way. In
November, it's slated to launch a profile,
according to Louise Eaton, the service's
advertising media and Web chief. The change of
heart occurred, she said, when the army received
"a lot of assurances from MySpace that they're
taking a more proactive approach to controlling
the environment ... and protecting the privacy of
people under 18".
In a telephone interview
with Tomdispatch, Eaton said that MySpace
production teams were working with army Web
designers and a team from McCann Erickson, the
army's ad agency, to create an interactive site
complete with downloads, videos, access to blogs,
an RSS (really simple syndication) feed and
"several ways to contact a recruiter". While the
army's designers are primarily after the eyeballs
of 17-24-year-old "enlistment prospects", she
recognized that a younger set may also be taking a
look. "It's all right for younger people to see
it, it's not propaganda," she commented.
According to Eaton, the army's MySpace.com
profile page is entirely devoted to shuttling
people to its official GoArmy website. Taking a
page from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's
book, she defines success - in this case online,
not in Iraq - in terms of "metrics". For her,
three are key: page views, people who contact the
army for "more information", and traffic to
GoArmy.com. "We'll be very interested to see how
many people register as our friend," she
confessed, suggesting that she expected them to be
"very, very, very many in number".
MySpace
proved impossible to contact on its work with the
military, refusing to respond to multiple
messages, but Eaton was expansive when it came to
what was on the army's online drawing board. Her
service, she assured me, was "not just interested
in the enlistment prospects, the young people ...
We're also interested in their parents."
Unlike the military's debut on MySpace,
this isn't in itself news. After all, the army
already had parents in its online sights last year
through Today'sMilitary.com, a slick website that
professes to "to educate parents and other adults
about the opportunities and benefits available to
young people in the military today" with nary a
mention of war, injury or death. What is news is
the army's coming venture in targeting grown-ups
through America Online, where it will launch "a
social networking site for parents".
The
army's eyes are also on "the blogosphere". Eaton
noted that "many, many military people
unofficially participate, and we're studying that
and trying to figure out where to go with that".
And don't forget about YouTube.com, a
video-posting site that bills itself as "a
consumer media company for people to watch and
share original videos worldwide through a Web
experience". "YouTube is doing some cool things,"
said Eaton. "We don't know where it's going to go,
but we're watching it closely."
Even while
meeting its current recruiting goals this year,
the military is feeling the heat and pulling out
all the stops to attract potential recruits and
fill the ranks. Like its sponsorships of the
Professional Bull Riders, the Professional Rodeo
Cowboys' Association and NASCAR (the National
Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), its use of
specially engineered video games and snazzy
television commercials, the Pentagon's new focus
on finding "friends" on social-networking sites is
a symptom of how hard-pressed its officials really
are. Increasingly desperate to recruit and retain
bodies, the US military continues to invade new
media territory, from text-messaging to Pentagon
podcasting.
Today, sexual predators aren't
the only ones trolling the Internet for young
bodies. MySpace claims to be taking steps to
safeguard children from a certain type of
cyber-stalker while, at the same time,
facilitating the efforts of another group just as
interested in putting those young bodies in truly
uncomfortable situations. With MySpace "friends"
like these, who needs enemies? After all, what
kind of "friend" looks to enlist you in a
potentially life-threatening enterprise already
considered a catastrophe by most Americans?
The militarization of MySpace is just the
latest Pentagon effort to occupy a new realm that
will put the military product in front of ever
more young eyes. The role of "friendly"
MySpace.com, taking a desperate military's money
to target its hordes of young friends searching
for popularity online is troubling.
But
it's also typical of the business side of the
military-corporate complex, because it's the
civilian firms - producing everything from weapons
to websites - that allow the military to function
as it does. In the case of MySpace, the friendly
firm is deeply involved in producing the US Army's
page and will, said Eaton, be "doing the daily
maintenance" on it.
If bios at the site
are to be believed, there are young Iraqis on
MySpace. What if you, an American kid with an
Iraqi MySpace "friend", check in with that
friendly US Marine Corps recruiter, enlist, and
are sent to Iraq by your MySpace military "friend"
and the latter "friend" calls on you to kill the
former? Does MySpace have any reservations about
setting up a system where such a scenario could
become a reality?
Nick Turse is
the associate editor and research director of
TomDispatch.com.
