This is Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear
weekday afternoons on the Drive. Joe McNeil has covered technology for over a decade.
She's the author of a book called Lurking, How a Person Became a
User, and her new podcast, which can be heard on the iHeartRadio app
and everywhere you get podcasts, is called Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace,
Joanna, I cringe. I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.
There's an entire generation of people out there who don't even know nor have
experienced MySpace. Oh. I mean, you can't blame them. It was
a flip in history, and if you're quite young, you might not remember,
but I hope if you are curious you will check out this podcast,
especially people who might not have been even alive when it was sounded. This
was the baby brother of all social media, wasn't it. Oh? I
love that phrasing. It really was. And it was this scrappy baby brother,
you know it. It was the punk kid. It had the emo
bangs and also like this uh rock and roll heart uh and definitely gotten into
some trouble. But I think one thing you'll find with my Space. Uh,
looking over this history is how much of life today life through the internet,
These experiences that are quite common today. It started on my Space.
Well, let's get back to the beginning. How did my Space begin?
Because this was long before Zuckerberg there was this was long before Basis, This
was long before all those guys, you know it was about it was a
couple of years before that. It's a little tricky to say it when when
it started in two thousand and three and uh the company was co founded by
UH, Chris to Wolfs and Tom Anderson, and they were working inside a
company and they noticed a lot of activity on other online other online platforms,
and they thought, oh, this looks really cool. Why don't we do
this here? And they reached out their friends. They this was a company
that did a lot of marketing, so having some people's emails was good for
a marketing company, getting emails from log and identities UM, and it just
took off, like I don't think any of them expected that it would rocket
to um mass attention the way it did. Joan McNeil, host of the
podcast Main accounts, The story of my Space is joining us. So when
they got this thing going. Did they realize what they had on their hands
or were they just just trying to explore a new means of communication. I
would say a little bit of both. I mean, certainly they were ambitious,
but the hidden element was how could this scale the way it did?
And you know, like with online communities in the nineties, they were very
niche, like you would sign up for you know, if you had an
all account, maybe you'd go to a community for people who love horseback riding
or they love the bad metallic orsonthing like that. You know, you look
for something very specific and sign that community and keep in touch with that community.
With my Space, it was much broader and you could see people's faces.
That was the other change. All of a sudden, in about two
thousand and three, people were getting broadband internet. It wasn't as slow as
dial up, so you could upload photos of yourself, You could show your
identity to the world. You could show kind of curated identity of yourself,
and people were sharing that that real that I mean real, And I would
say a little bit quotation marks because you were definitely a lot of people on
by suits group definitely staging their identity. But they you could connect the person
to the profile page. Well, well you also right away began reading about
people addicted to their MySpace and going nuts when they didn't get enough traffic.
Oh yeah, that was definitely the case. And I mean what one area
where it was definitely the case was the very young users, because you could
be as young as thirteen years old. Officially, my Space said the age
one was thirteen, So you've had very young users who didn't have a lot
of parental supervision. Because again this was it was a mass platform, but
I was still youth oriented. And when you think about thirteen year olds mixing
in a place with much of twenty five year olds, that's that's where a
lot of the trouble showed up. And we are talking to the producer and
host of Main Accounts The Story of MySpace, a podcast you can hear everywhere
you get podcast including the iHeartRadio app Joanne McNeil, and um, did they
right away? Did they? Did they realize they could monetize this or was
that ultimately the failure? I think that's the area that you know nowadays we
hear about things like surveillance capitalism, that you trade your data for free use
of services. This conversation just was not happening when my Space launched, and
they were you know, I think they had a sense of selling ads against
activity, but I saw in my research that they just weren't even really collecting
their data in certain cases, like they they didn't have a sense of of
the value of the of the various user data necessarily or you know, it
was just something that the the mindset and at this point in time was just
like, okay, well, well, you know, there were still expectations
of privacy for these users. There were still expectations that you know, you're
not going to like have this stile with everybody's age and taste and everything and
sell that to advertisers. That practice just was not the case as it is
with the big platforms today. No, it took this Lee's ball of Zuckerberg
to figure that out. That's all my words, not yours, My words,
not yours, Joe and McNeil of main accounts the story of MySpace,
and ultimately nothing went away faster it seems, Oh yeah, and it is.
It was kind of quite a shock for the people who had built their
lives on my Space. I'm thinking specifically of musicians. You loved my Space
for the opportunity to share tracks. And when you think about it as a
music of or you know, finding new music can be can be tricky.
And if you have this opportunity, you see a band, they seem like
their their their taste looks like it matches with your taste. All you need
to do is press a button on their profile page and you hear their track
and you can give them a chance. And so this opportunity for musicians to
find to find fans, for fans to keep up with your musicians, that
that was that felt like a major loss. It wasn't the sand as being
able to just jump to another platform like Facebook. Facebook was, you know,
Facebook had a lot more rules and my Space was that a lot of
the creativity came out of how free wheeling it was. My main accounts.
The story of my Space is the podcast. Joan McNeil is the host.
And here's a philosophical question for you, because you've really got into the nuts
and bolts of the birth of social media when you when you when you birth
to this podcast, has social media changed American society for the good or for
the bad? Oh? I mean, this is the question for the ages,
and I'm pointed it's going to take it in the space of it's a
little bit of both, and I think there are elements of social media where
people have found like communities, sound sound love, found found close friends,
found people that they wouldn't otherwise have in their lives, and that's been an
incredible experience. But at the same time, these are social spaces like any
other, and you need to have um you need you need supported communities,
you need moderators, you need to have like a community that make sure that
everyone is safe and feels respected there, and some of these platforms are not
so great at that. Main accounts the story of my space. The podcast
from Joanne McNeil can be heard on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts.
Joe and McNeil, thanks for joining us and we will be listening to
your podcast. Oh thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening
to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen
to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeart Media Presentation