Myspace is a terrible evil gated community of people with bad design sense and a pathological desire to be loved, infested with spammers, robots, stalkers, hotlinkers, bandwidth bandits, nightmare fonts, overcrowded backgrounds, autoplay songs (perhaps the biggest SIN), Rupert Murdoch, and perhaps the lowest signal to noise ratio on the entire web.
So says Ballardian.com on a story about the existence of a J.G. Ballard MySpace page, complete with autoplaying Kevin Ayers and 124 friends as I’m writing this. It’s a fake profile, as Ballard doesn’t use the Internet, but Simon Sellars notes that JGB has already received one request to do a public reading (by East London ‘local writer-reading event’, Anything But Hackneyed). Presumably they were unaware that the profile was not real, as I would probably have been had I not been informed otherwise.
In a follow-up post, Sellars relishes the idea of the virtual Ballard giving a reading, and what a seductive notion that is. He goes on to deconstruct MySpace as Baudrillard might have seen it, an online ‘hyper-market’, purveyor of, as one of the commenters on the post says, a “pernicious virtual narcotic”. Fake celebrity MySpace profiles are legion, but Ballard is an interesting choice, given his obsessions with the psychology of technology and dystopia. It would be too easy to write off MySpace as banal, as devoid of real personality, a Ballardian suburban desert, but Ballard’s presence there is a little more explicit now that someone (who? I wonder) has set up this page.
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