What do you do with a whole lot of money, a love for celebrity junk, and a longtime plan to dominate the media? Apparently, you buy the wildly popular, growingly controversial website MySpace. 75-year-old billionaire media king Rupert Murdoch, best known as the guy whose multibillion-dollar News Corporation created both the Fox Corporation and the greasy celebrity tabloid Star, among other media conglomerates, recently purchased Intermix Media Inc., the company that hosts myspace.com, for nearly $590 million. MySpace, which originally started as the “cooler Friendster” website for young adults, quickly turned into a booming business that sparked a number of controversies between child molesters and age-fabricating youngsters. On the plus side, however, MySpace is controlled by the people, for the people – a trend, insists Murdoch, that is slowly taking control of the world.

In the age of reality shows and blogspots, “technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control,” Murdoch told Wired magazine this month. Taking over MySpace, then, was a pretty clever move for a man whose peers barely know how to use a remote. The new ‘internet crack,’ so to speak, MySpace not only epitomizes Murdoch’s statement but marks the first popular step (among the younger crowd, that is) toward public dominance, starting with the most popular development of our generation: the internet. As many have found, the best way to avoid a MySpace addiction is to simply never click the url – like Facebook, its effect isn’t anything short of phenomenal, giving the members of today’s painfully lazy society yet another opportunity to sit on their rears for hours on end…no pun intended. Murdoch’s current status as kingpin over all that is gossipy, social, and designed specifically for the layman, therefore, is in fact the perfect addendum to a website most cherished by 40-year-old virgins, horny teenagers, and popularity-starved individuals that spend hours befriending celebrities simply to make their pages cooler than yours.

Murdoch’s new conquest has already become wildly popular among the ‘non-ordinary’ public. While radio deejays and celebrities constantly pimp their Myspace pages, music artists are dropping the MySpace name as if it’s the new Belvedere. Rapper Grafh, for instance, an artist formerly only popular among the underground scene, has already gotten significant radio airtime with “MySpace Jumpoff,” an ode to the benefits of meeting (and subsequently hooking up with) girls online. Unfortunately, like many booming businesses, MySpace’s public ownership runs the risk of becoming too commercial for the anti-hipsters of the world. On the upside, frustrated Web surfers can now turn their social networking addiction to asmallworld.net, a private, invitation-only website that’s more like a clique-y Facebook instead of the voyeurism Mecca that is “the Space.” It’s impossible to enroll in or even view this site without a special membership request from a friend, so you’ll essentially feel like the nerd in high school all over again…unless you’re invited, of course. So until then, go ahead and keep taking those half-naked webcam pictures that strategically highlight your “good” parts, but remember: Rupert’s watching.

A PimpWiz Exclusive By, Alyson Mance

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