"No."

"Oh, well you should get one."

I have this above conversation at least 2 or 3 times a week. Apparently there was an internet revolution that I missed out on, because it feels like I'm the only guy age 18 to 24 without a MySpace page. But, you know what? Lately, I've been priding myself on that fact. For the life of me, I cannot see the appeal in it. What is it about posting a picture of yourself you took in a mirror with a camera-phone and creating a cyberspace network of friends you will probably never meet that is so attractive? Perhaps I'm just don't know what's cool anymore (a prospect I find quite improbable), but I think MySpace is pretty lame. But could it also be dangerous?

Alright, so what exactly is a MySpace? Well, I can tell you what they're not: visually attractive. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the internet was made by a bunch of high school kids without any html or graphic design knowledge? Well, browse through any random MySpace page and you can find out. Granted, I have seen a few clean and attractive pages, but a majority use poor color combinations, a myriad of pointless 'about me' charts, and my biggest pet peeve: background music. But, essentially, a MySpace is the mixture of a blog and a virtual address book. It's a place where groups of friends can network with each other, spread gossip, and do all that other stuff teen groups do.

Sounds pretty harmless, but is it? Despite the obvious dangers of posting personal information on the internet, there may also be a deeper and far more sinister plot at hand.

A brief search of MySpace history reveals that although the site began as an upstart project for a UCLA alumni, it is now under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. So wait, could it be that MySpace, a haven for teenage rebels and a 'stick it to the man' mentality is in fact being run by one the world's biggest media conglomerates? Oh snap.

For what Murdoch has in store for MySpace, I turn to documentary filmmaker Alex Jones. For those that follow The K-Files, you'll know that I'm a pretty big Jones fan. Although I may not believe everything he says to be fact, I believe his intentions to be sincere. On the subject of MySpace, Jones believes it to be a "Trojan horse" for internet censorship. He lays it all out in the appropriately titled article, "MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship," written by himself and Paul Joseph Watson and posted on Infowars.com. Basically, he goes on to say that with the free-flowing current of information provided by the internet, the media elite needed to create a system that could win back their power. By making MySpace hip and trendy, he argues, they can get a generation of internet users accustomed to the kind of controlled internet hub that has been planned for the Internet 2 project.

In the article, Jones presents a story detailing how a blog posting critical of MySpace was deleted. He then took it a step further by creating his very own MySpace to test it. You can check it out at http://www.myspace.com/alex_infowarrior. He claims that he followed all of the rules outlined in the End User License Agreement, and will continue posting his NWO/conspiracy stories to see if he gets censored. If nothing else, seeing the image he chose for his avatar is worthy of checking it out.

So far, there has been no funny business regarding censorship, so either Jones' has blown this out of proportion (I wouldn't put it past him), or Murdoch and company are leaving him alone in fear of creating a martyr. In either case, I think the danger is still real. MySpace may not be the stepping stone on the path to totalitarianism like some fear, but if it is to be a format for things to come, the internet is indeed in trouble. And, at the least, it's not good to become desensitized to the constant bombardment of invasive (and sometimes hidden) advertising becoming common place on MySpace, as well as our modern world as a whole.