My Space and Stalker-book

Do you have MySpace? How about Facebook? If you are anything like millions of college students around the country (the original audience for Facebook), then you more than likely own a profile on one or both of these mediums. You periodically (or obsessively) check your profile to see if a new friend is awaiting you, or a dire message from the love of your life has found its way into your mailbox. And, more so with MySpace than Facebook, you write about your day and how your jerk of a professor added another three sections of reading to the fifty-five you already haven't made it through.
Now imagine that when you log into your account, you have immediate access to all the entertainment news and gossip you can imagine...wait, you do! This is what Dawn Shepherd and Carolyn R. Miller call "mediated voyeurism" in their article "Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog". Mediated voyeurism is described as the desire to learn about others' (usually famous) lives from the outside, as a spectator.
This topic brought forth a pretty interesting discussion in class. Do we expect honesty from all these profiles we link ourselves to? In most cases, yes, we do. In the instance of "Kaycee", a hoax blog about a girl who died of leukemia, there was great uproar about the dishonest postings of the woman posing as the mother of a dead teenage daughter. On Facebook, we assume that those we connect to are who they say they are...even Brett Favre. But, what about all those Dateline specials about catching predators and teaching your tween children not to be idiots about the information they provide to their "friends"? Obviously, we are a skeptical society. Is everyone out to hurt our children? Most likely not, but you can't be too sure.
Now, we can connect blogging to things that are common to us, such as Facebook or MySpace, but where did it all come from? According to Shepherd and Miller, blogs are a result of a genre of pamphlets. Excuse me? Pamphlets do not equal MySpace, or These Aren't My Pants. Or do they? Pamphlets get people to pay attention to a cause. Well, there you go. You can see the transition. Someone like Justin Timberlake (as I mentioned in class) has a MySpace profile. Yes, he as almost 600,o00 friends, but they are all there to see when he is going to drop his next single, what city he will be in, where people can buy merchandise. It's genius. Without spending more than a few minutes of his time, he just advertised his profession to 600,000 people! Amazing. All the perks of the pamphlet without wasting loads of paper and ink. But, again, back to mediated voyeurism; is that really him? Are you being presented with a truthful front? Or is it a sweaty, forty year old man posing as a sexy pop idol?