History lesson for all you hip youngens…
Let Grandpa tell you a story about the long forgotten dark days of yesteryear or something…
Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the Year of Our Lord, 2006 AD, there was this social media site called MySpace.
Now, at the time, it didn’t know it was a social media site. There were no Facebook (I think), no Instagram (I’m relatively sure) and no TikTok (I have zero idea what that is). With nothing to compare it to (let’s just say), this “MySpace” was THE place to be.
Your parents could put pictures on line (thank you, Mr. Gore), they could “like” bands (like the Glen Miller Band or any embarrassing-to-their-kids band you can think of) and movie stars. Most importantly they could blog. Mind you, we use to do all this while walking uphill in the snow while battling velociraptors and laying down track on this newfangled coal-fueled cross country steam train shenanigans… But we were social. Demented and sad, but social.
Anyhoo, back in the Deep Real Estate Bubble Burst of the mid-2000s I use to fancy myself an indie film maker. I use to make “talkies” with my fellow filmmaker friends. I would write the scripts, produce, direct and sometimes shoot my own movies. I put my blood, sweat and tears into each and every one.
They were mildly terrible. But I didn’t (don’t) care.
But the point of the story, and I do have one, is that I would blog about my behind the scenes experiences on my MySpace page. I really enjoyed sharing my comical happenstances with the tens of people who followed me.
Flash forward to this past week when it was suggests to me by a VERY good friend that I should start blogging again.
So I dusted off and opened my old WordPress app and tried to log on. Seven wrong passwords later, I was in. This made my brain drift back to the days of yore. Excited by the power of literally nothing tangible, I looked for a true dinosaur… To my surprise, MySpace still exists. I frantically logged on and was thrilled to discover MY space still existed!!!
And it was completely empty. All of my pictures, videos, blogs, likes, memories and woefully-dated musings were gone. Wiped away forever in the multiverse of corporate takeovers and updated servers.
The odd thing was that all of my “friends” were still there, listed on my page. All of the faces and names that meant something to me in 2007 were there smiling back at me. I quickly went to each and every page to see what was “new”. Who changed jobs? Who became rich and shameless?
Each and every page was blank.
Everything was empty, cold, abandoned… No hope to track these folks down. We never exchanged digits. We never exchanged personal email addresses. Why would we? We were living in a quasi-modern world where people never actually MET…
That would be way too cringy…
Young padawans, listen to Old Man Argyle. Ok, well PRETEND to listen…
Every once in awhile put the iPhone down, go out IRL and meet people. Laugh, learn, live. Really live.
Fill YourSpace with really real faces as often as possible. It’s a scene, man.
Living socially online is awesome. It’s fun certainly and educational for sure. But mix in some honest, old fashioned face time (not FaceTime) with your peers. Those memories will live forever in your personal hard drive.
Until next time, go meet each other IRL.
Bloog!
Agent Argyle 