MySpace Aesthetics, Cell Phone Ringtones, And A Case For Forced Natural Selection

[Currently Listening To: Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World]


So I was on MySpace the other day. Yeah, I know, I know. But I can't help it. As awful as it all is, the voyeur in me can't stay away - there's something so fascinating about the way people choose to represent themselves to the world - which aspects of their personalities take over when it comes time to decorate their little plot of narcissistic digital real estate. Foremost among my many sources of MySpace disgust is the ever-growing number of people who display a monumental lack of taste by picking a convoluted custom layout from one of those third party "Pimp My MySpace" websites, and turn their profile into an illegible mess of tiled backgrounds, neon font colors, transparencies, animated GIFs, embedded audio/video (all of it autoplaying at the same time, of course), javascript slideshows, and a strange obsession with having the largest possible number of complete strangers on their friends list. It's probably about time I start collecting aesthetic atrocities like this one for some sort of future Unfathomably Hideous MySpace Profile Awards. If you have any winners, please leave them in the comments of this entry. It begs the question of how one of the ugliest websites on the internet could also be one of the most popular - and why someone with some clout and taste (Apple comes to mind) hasn't stepped up with a better and more eye-pleasing alternative.

Anyway, my point is that I was on MySpace, and I found myself looking at one of those annoying Flash advertisements they always have. You know the ones - you've seen them all over the place. They'll have some inane little cartoon Flash game that invites you to whack the President, or hike the football, or some other stupid thing. There's a button you can click to play the game, and if you succeed, you "WIN A FREE RINGTONE!!" Well, much like anyone else with more than a third grade education, I see these ads all the time and I've never paid any attention to them, other than to briefly roll my eyes and wonder who's dumb enough to click on those things. After all, obviously as soon as you click it you're taken to a website where some absurd marketing device attempts to con you into signing up for something in exchange for a free ringtone. It's not like you just win this stupid little game and suddenly get a ringtone. And even if you did, what in the name of fuck would I want a free cell phone ringtone for? I wouldn't. Ever. So of course, like any other reasonable person, I never click on those ads... At least, I hadn't, until the other day. The other day, something struck me. I glanced at one of those stupid little flash cartoons, and I guess my eyes sat on it for longer than they ever have before... and somehow, something snapped inside my brain.

The ad was these two little robots, standing on cliffs, opposite each other. Each one had a mechanical arm with a little chompy monster for a hand. In between them, a cell phone was just floating there, ripe for the taking. It was practically begging one of these little robots to reach over and pick it up. A large font instructed me to "GRAB THE PHONE!" which I was presumably to do by clicking a large red button:



What distressed me about this ad was that the robot on the left - a strange and obviously insidious creature with beady eyes, a fishbowl head, and a body of coiled metal twisted to resemble an atom - he was already furiously spinning his gears, extending his little monster hand slowly but steadily towards the floating phone. He had a stunningly unfair head start, while the other robot - the t-shirt-sporting television head whose fate I had been entrusted with unsolicited - he just stood there, helpless, his chomping arm hanging limp to his side. Unable to move on his own, he was forced to watch as his nemesis grew closer and closer to taking away the only thing he had ever wanted in life - that damned floating cell phone. And me, I just sat there, hesitant to intervene and yet horrified that I could be entrusted with such power and not use it for this poor robot's benefit.

So I clicked. I clicked the big red button, and lo and behold, the little robot's arm moved a little. So I clicked again, and again, until I was furiously clicking, cringing in suspense as my robot's little chompy monster arm raced against impossible odds to reach the cell phone first. And then...



I did it. I won! The little television-headed robot got his precious phone, Rupert Murdoch got a few cents richer, and I was thrust into a strange world of pop-up advertising which informed me what I'd feared all along: There was no ringtone. At least, not without a great deal of further hassle. Something about participation in something. Well, at least now I knew for sure, and ultimately I wasn't disappointed, because honestly, who in the FUCK gives a shit about cell phone fucking ringtones? Shaking loose from the treacherous grasp of clever marketing which had temporarily ensnared me, I was reminded of how absurd I find it that a whole industry has sprung up based entirely on the ignorance and bad taste involved in purchasing ringtones.

Have you seen that stupid Verizon commercial that plays before movies (I presume it plays on TV as well, but thanks to Tivo I haven't watched a TV commercial in years), with that hunk-of-shit Nelly Furtado song playing, and all these idiotic Gap ad extras holding their cell phones up to their ears and doing embarrassing pseudo-hip-hop dance moves, always with their eyes closed to show just how much they're feeling the groove from their shitty little phone's primitive MP3 playback capabilities? Being in a movie theatre forced to sit through that abomination (don't even get me started on ads before movies) has filled me anew with a fresh batch of contempt for the world on a number of occasions. How in the name of Christ did the sound your phone makes to alert you that someone is calling you become such a tremendously big deal to everyone? Are we all that fucking stupid? Apparently so, because it's everywhere you look: TV commercials advertise ringtones, cellular companies use it as a marketing hook, it's all over websites and billboards... The major record companies have created entire "mobile" divisions to deal with the demand for ringtones of their music, and capitalize tremendously off of it. Why? Because it's insanely profitable. They charge two or three bucks for shitty little 30 second clips of disposable pop songs, just so someone can have a tinny, low-fidelity chorus from a Kelly Clarkson track looping out of their pocket whenever they get a text message of broken english and lazy abbreviations (i.e. "hey wut r u doin?"). Two or three dollars for ringtones, when you could get the entire song in CD quality off of iTunes for ninety nine cents. When presented with such an offer, the appropriate response from the masses should have been, simply, "no." No, phone companies and record labels, we have no interest in paying an exorbitant amount of money for something that should be free, just for the sake of annoying everyone around us with an obnoxious loop of bad music. Of course, the actual response was - amazingly - the exact opposite. I can almost see the suits at Cingular standing around sales charts after this all took off, their mouths agape in bewilderment that it had actually worked. Saying to themselves: "You mean... people actually fell for this? People are paying us for little bits of music to play from their cell phones??" Of course we did, Mr. Giant Telecommunications Company. We will happily be the fertilizer of stupidity in your garden of unfathomable wealth, if you just market it the right way.

All of this rambling is funneling down to one major theme: People. Are. Idiots. En masse, Americans in particular are a vapid, ignorant, taste-challenged, easily-distracted ocean of marketing victim automatons. Why are we so much more interested in American Idol than world affairs? Why do more people read tabloids than newspapers? Why does the nightly news highlight car chases and celebrity break-ups while glazing over issues of massive global significance? Why are we so meek? Why are we not outraged that our president lied to take us to war, or that education funding is abysmally low while we continue to pour money into the military, or that oil companies are making record profits while gas prices climb and no alternative energy sources are being aggressively pursued, or that global warming is going to fuck us up sooner than we think, or that millions of people don't have healthcare, or that we're spending billions and billions and billions of dollars attempting to repair our own mess in Iraq, while millions of our own citizens are homeless or hungry? We should be living in times of extreme social unrest, of protest and change. We should be a nation seeking out the truth, uniting together to demand answers and accountability, asserting ourselves as a society who will not be so easily manipulated. But we're not. Why? Because that takes thought. It takes reading, and critical analysis, and an interest in the world outside of our little bubbles of simple comforts. It's a lot easier to be zombified by Everybody Loves Raymond than to better yourself with knowledge. We've been brilliantly distracted by ringtones, and television, and MySpace, and sports, and whatever else keeps us from learning, or questioning, or in any way bettering ourselves or our society.

My Stepfather is not someone who would probably identify himself as a Republican, nor would he, when pressed, particularly agree with most of our President's policies. But in the last election he - despite my mother's pleadings to the contrary - voted for Bush. His reason? "Well, my life hasn't gotten any worse since he's been in office, so why rock the boat?" That tragic mentality seems to be held by far, far more people than it should, in regards to a wide range of topics. They've got their good-enough lives with their job and their house, they've got sports scores and ringtones to keep them distracted, and that's all they need. I can't wait until everything goes straight to shit. I can't wait until our whole civilization implodes under the weight of its own greed and arrogance and ignorance. I can't wait until we finally reach the end of one of the many direct routes to self-destruction we've been so carefully carving out over the years, and everyone wonders how it snuck up on them like that. It's been there all along, people - you just weren't paying attention.

Sometimes I think the real problem is that the comforts of modern life have circumvented the process of natural selection, allowing whole bloodlines of incredibly stupid people to continue on well after they should have died out. We need to give natural selection a little push, and help eradicate the world of vacant idiots. Personally, I'd start with celebrity worship. If you seriously follow celebrity gossip, and genuinely care about Gweneth Paltrow having a baby or how Jessica Simpson is holding up since her break-up... Kill yourself. If you've ever used the word "Brangelina" with no trace of irony... Kill yourself. Obsessing over the inane personal lives of borderline-retarded complete strangers because your own life is devoid of any interest or meaning is possibly the most pathetic way to waste your sorry life away that I can think of. Every issue of US Weekly should contain a packet of poisonous gas that bursts when someone opens the magazine, killing them instantly. Celebrity gossip shows on E! should emit radioactive waves from the TV, rendering you unable to reproduce if you watch it for more than ten minutes. As soon as you push the button to confirm your ringtone download of any song with the word "thurr" in it, your phone should detonate, taking your empty fucking head off along with it. It's not murder, it's just forced natural selection. It's really for the best.

The sad thing is, I shouldn't feel as smart as I do. I shouldn't have any place to talk. And yet, the bar has gotten so low, that people consider me fairly intelligent and comparatively well-informed, simply because I can form a sentence and I could give you a basic summary of what's happening in the Middle East. I've put the bare minimum effort into my education, and that's all it takes to feel intelligent in this country. After all, I didn't graduate college, and the bit of college I did attend was art school which, if anything, actually made me dumber. So I'm working with a high school education here - and that's public school. I didn't come from money or privilege, I had no special treatment or silver spoon opportunities. Likewise, my oh-so-intimate knowledge of world affairs comes from watching The Daily Show and briefly skimming through the news every day, only occasionally giving a subject thorough investigation if it's something that interests me. So it's sad that with that minimum effort, I feel like I'm in fucking MENSA compared to a lot of people. If we were a society that even remotely championed knowledge and shunned ignorance - if scholars and scientists were our heroes, instead of basketball players and pop singers - I would be considered incredibly stupid - and rightfully so. Thankfully, though, this is no such place, and everything is relative - so I can continue living the American dream of being incredibly smug with really very little to back it up.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense. I'm gonna go see if anyone left me a comment on MySpace.