MySpace vs. Facebook

I joined Facebook about a month ago, mostly for the benefit of my friends north of the border. I've found that my Canadian friends are more likely to use Facebook while my American friends primarily use MySpace. I have several good friends from Canada, so I decided to take the plunge and be a double-networker. Since efficiency and streamlining are values of mine, this was quite a leap.

Now that I've given them both a try, I still prefer MySpace, which is ironic given my purist leanings. Facebook has a much more streamlined, professional look; while people can add applications up the wazoo (speaking of which, don't be offended if I don't play Scrabulous with you or compare our movie tastes; as they say, "It's not you; it's me."), their pages have the same background, layout, and font. It takes a LOT less time to load than most MySpace pages, some of which might as well include a disco ball and strobe lights for the amount of Flash-y shit plastered on.

And being an academic (I can call myself that now, right?), you'd think I'd appreciate the fact that not only was Facebook created initially for college students, but also that Facebook users are more likely to graduate college than MySpace users (the latter statistic probably caused by the former fact). I mean, Facebook users just seem smarter, don't they? Nobody can seem that brilliant whose bulletin posts include a survey detailing what the last person they kissed ate for breakfast, as well as a message proclaiming that if you don't forward this within 72 hours, you don't love God and will probably die in a tub of icecubes of kidney theft. I'm also pretty sure that I've noticed fewer spelling and punctuation errors on Facebook than on MySpace.

However, it's partly because I'm an academic that I love MySpace. I know it's stupid. I know it's gaudy, and lame, and addictive, and immature, especially when I judge my importance based on how many people's Top Friends I'm on. But academics are humans first and thinkers second. Just because we spend most of our days living the "life of the mind" doesn't mean that the lives of the body or the concerns of the greater community have been excised from our lives. Just the opposite: because we are up in our heads most of the time, we are (hopefully) that much more aware of our own moments of delicious shallowness and inanity.

Part of what I love about much of the medieval literature I've studied is how it panders to the folk culture, making explicit our most human urges (eating, pooping, and having sex). Many of the old fabliaux would rival the movies Dumb and Dumber or American Pie for complete vulgarity and stupidity. But I love this, because it's so true--humans are such a great mix of the divine and the grotesque. This was part of the struggle for medieval thinkers; are we body, or spirit? Many of them vilified the body, privileging only the spiritual part of man, but many other reveled in the body (and the bawdy). And the best of them married deep spiritual meaning to grossly material tales in subversive ways, showing that the church's over-emphasis on "putting this body to death" was off the mark.

This very subversiveness is often a hallmark of literature that would be classified as "carnivalesque." In the festival of Carnival, authority figures like the mayor, the priest, or the king, were often deposed for a day and replaced with the town idiot or court fool--basically the medieval version of "sticking it to the man." And, leaving evil corporate owners out of this, Facebook definitely feels more like "the man"--standard, institutionalized, and bland--than MySpace, with its smorgasborg of festive color, video, music, and advertising.

For example, today's videos on MySpace's main page are: "Robot Destroys Car," "Alone with Creepy Baby," and "Deer Attacks Dog." Could it possibly be more grotesque, materialistic, and popular-culture based? But on the other hand, MySpace is this generation's method of keeping in touch, allowing human spirits to commune and connect, often very deeply, over great distances. So if that doesn't embody the human condition, I don't know what does. (Not Facebook.)

A specific moment this past weekend marks a new beginning in my life--the beginning of my official geekdom.

It happened when I got all verklempt looking at a print of the crewmembers of the Starship Enterprise, from the Next Generation--Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Dr. Crusher, Will Riker, Lieutenant Worf, Data, etc. I started getting teary-eyed, and I had no idea what was going on.

The guy at the booth, a slender bearded man, asked me if I had any questions.

"Um, no thanks. I'm just looking. My dad's a big fan of Next Generation," I said, trying to hide my irrational emotional response.

When I was a lot younger, I watched the show with my dad, him sitting on the floor, me sprawled out on the couch. I found "Q" hilarious and the Borg only slightly creepy; I also thought Wesley Crusher was really cute. (Now I'm much more likely to find Patrick Stewart dead-sexy.) Star Trek was television, which is a good enough excuse for any kid, but it was also interesting and provided something for my dad and I to talk about--some common ground.

So this past weekend I went to Dragon*Con, which is a sci-fi/fantasy fan convention in Atlanta. I only went because I thought I'd have a good time with Tanya. The only fan-groups I thought that I might even halfway belong to would be Harry Potter or HomestarRunner fans. But I was gloriously wrong.

Dragon*Con takes up three enormous hotels--the Marriott, the Hyatt, and the Hilton--in downtown Atlanta. Every room for a mile around is completely booked on Labor Day weekend. A specific police force is assigned to the event, guiding traffic, patrolling the hotel lobbies, and generally looking askance at the participants, half of whom are realistically dressed as sci-fi/fantasy characters.

And not just your normal characters. Oh, sure, there are probably as many Star Troopers at the con as there are bell boys in the hotels. And elves and fairies are a dime a dozen. You might think you were in the halls of Hogwarts for how many Gryffindor ties you see, or that zombies and vampires really ARE overrunning the planet.

But where else could you go where someone is dressed, not as Princess Leia, but as the hologram of Princess Leia that R2-D2 delivers to Luke Skywalker, and whose only response when you talk to her is "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!"? Where else would someone be dressed, not as Sirius Black, but as the moving Wanted poster of Sirius Black ("Have you seen this wizard? Approach with caution. Do not attempt to use magic against this man.")? Where else would you see an entire Tetris game--green T shape, blue L shape, red cube, etc.--walking down the street? Or a crossdressing Mad Hatter in hot pants and fishnet hose? Or seven Darth Mauls cheesing it up for a photo? Or three Thundercats walking around in skin-tight leather? Not to mention (but I will) all the women (and men) dressed in leather corsets and S&M gear.

One of the best parts of Dragon*Con is that it feeds the human desire for spectacle. We enjoy visual fantasy. Why else do we trick-or-treat at Halloween, or go to Mardi Gras, or watch Cirque Du Soleil, but to see what the human mind can imagine and what the human body can become? The most fun I had all weekend was escorting my 8-year-old cousin Kobe into the conference for a quick look around. Almost all that came out of his mouth for five minutes was "Wow." He got to meet Darth Vader, who was surprisingly affable, and the White Witch of Narnia, who demanded that he address her as "Your Majesty" and told him not to mention Christmas in front of her.

On my own, I enjoyed walking around and listening to conversations. I caught some pretty awesome snippets, such as:

One zombie to another: "Dude, if you're gonna dress like a zombie, ACT like a zombie!" The one guy was wasn't eating his quota of brains, I guess.

A tall Darth Vader struts into the lobby and lifts his arms, saying, ghetto-fied, "Where all my Stah Troopahs at?"

One leather-clad beer wench to another, while judging the costume of a third: "Cheap women wear cheap corsets." (I might modify that to, "Cheap women come to cons dressed like beer wenches, hoping to pick up single computer programmers.")

A cute prosthetics vendor, to me: "If you would have bought those elf ears from me, I would have applied them for free!" *wink*

One con-ite to another, looking fondly at a 6-year-old Princess Leia: "It's good to see that geeks are breeding."

And, in my mythology panel, the corniest joke ever about the collective unconscious: "We're all Jung at heart."

The irony of it all is delightful, the fact that these statements would make almost no sense in a "normal" setting, but here, at "the con," they're part of the general parlance. In fact, the con has its own unique fashions, spawned not by any specific show or book but just by the con itself. The ubiquitous "utilikilt" incorporates the kilt and the toolbelt, two items obviously created to complement each other.

It's this unabashed nerdiness that I love. These people are letting it all hang out (some of them, quite literally), and it's great. They don't feel the need to impress anyone or act like they are something they aren't, such as "cool." But in being so totally real, so unabashedly corny and silly and geeky, they become cool . . . truly cool, not the pretend cool that much of pop culture creates and affirms. And in that atmosphere, I feel at home.

I feel accepted for who I am . . . a half-geek, an English major who for many years felt the need to suppress and hide her fantasy leanings in favor of more canonical "literature", but is finally coming into her own. I love Lord of the Rings. I'm a big sucker for any story with hidden identities, an ancient prophecy, an unlikely hero, and a king. Give me a book about the magical properties of some crappy old stone or cup, and I'm hooked. I'm just not a fan to the point of dressing up like one of the characters. But it's completely okay that other people do.

In fact, I'm jealous. I wish I knew what character I would want to be. That was one of the questions of the weekend: "Who would you be, if you did dress up?" But I have no idea. There's no character that I feel such a strong affinity with that I would want to become that person for a day or two. I love Alice in Wonderland; I love Harry Potter; I love Homestar Runner. But one of the reasons I love them is that they're so "other." I am not the Red Queen, nor Hermione Granger, nor Marzipan or Senor Cardgage. I came to the conference not to become these characters, but to find myself among them.

And I did. I found myself at Dragon*Con--or encountered parts that had been lost for a while, buried among the relics of childhood. When I was thirteen, I stayed up until 2 in the morning reading Michael Crichton's "Sphere"; the next day, my dad and I discussed the book, all its ins, outs, and potentialities For the movie version, we chose Richard Dreyfuss for Norman and Demi Moore for Beth. We criticized the movie when it actually came out, with Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone instead. Being at the con was like traveling back in time into an extended conversation with my dad, relishing the feeling of being united by the love of story.