For years I’ve held off open­ing up, or rather cre­at­ing a MySpace account:“kartooner on Myspace(View my pro­file on MySpace)”:http://www.myspace.com/kartooner purely for rea­sons to pre­vent exploit­ing myself or others.

How­ever, I came to the real­iza­tion that when you look past the neg­a­tive aspects and focus instead on the pos­i­tive out­come of recon­nect­ing with peo­ple that you might have lost touch with, well then it doesn’t seem so bad.

In fact, it’s safe to say that despite the count­less amount of good and bad press, which any good jour­nal­ist or sane per­son would tell you is just effort­less adver­tis­ing, there are a lot of inter­est­ing out­comes that occur when you set up your own space on the web.

To me, MySpace is a messy com­bi­na­tion of per­sonal jour­nal and media, mixed together with self expres­sion and some­times self reflec­tion. If one were to attempt to map Myspace it would prob­a­bly be nei­ther here nor there.

Frankly, it’s a phe­nom­e­non that would sound won­der­ful on paper or pitched to in front of a group of investors, but in it of itself it’s like a swap meet of indi­vid­u­als com­ing from var­i­ous social, eth­nic, reli­gious and cul­tural back­grounds on dis­play for the world to see, a messy one at that.

It’s also a poten­tially dan­ger­ous breed­ing ground for stalk­ers, but that light has already been shone many times by the media and it’s not worth revis­it­ing that haz­ard since it steers the pur­pose of this arti­cle in another direction.

Back on topic, it’s worth not­ing that within 3 days of acti­vat­ing an account on MySpace — as well as mak­ing it pretty thanks to Mike Davidson’s Hack­ing a More Taste­ful Myspace — I’ve recon­nected with peo­ple that I lost touch with 4 to 5 years ago and that alone is remark­able con­sid­er­ing I felt it’d be dif­fi­cult to do so otherwise.

The thought of con­tact­ing and recon­nect­ing with peo­ple from my past, the major­ity of them from high school, has always been in the back of my mind, but the con­ver­sa­tion starter, for exam­ple; “How I’d approach the per­son or begin the con­ver­sa­tion” always seemed a bit dif­fi­cult. Also, there never really seems like a good moment to do so and the notion that it might be awk­ward as such can make what would oth­er­wise seem appro­pri­ate and good willed turn into some­thing con­trived or put on.

Sad to say, but Myspace has allowed me to jump right in and test the waters. To show friends from my past that I really do care despite the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For that, I can for­give the site for being a mess from a func­tion­al­ity stand­point and instead remained focused on sift­ing through the vast resource of indi­vid­u­als and egnited friend­ships from yesteryear.