Can MySpace.com morph into OurSpace. org?

The question came to mind this week midway through the third annual Personal Democracy Forum gathering and gabfest in Manhattan. In fact, with its emphasis on social networking in service of political engagement, this year’s PDF raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: What does it mean to be a ‘member’ of an online political group? How do you define ‘activism?’ What exactly is a ‘social network?’ Do ‘lots of different groups working on lots of different issues’ actually constitute a ‘community?’ And do any politicians (certainly not keynote speaker and Attorney General of New York Eliot Spitzer, or panel moderator and US Representative Anthony Weiner) actually get it yet when it comes to dealing with the netroots?

But the question of how ‘personal democracy’ (with its emphasis on ‘How Technology Is Changing Politics’) can employ technology to create more ‘interpersonal’ democracy — the aforementioned morphing of MySpace into OurSpace – remains central to any future reinvigoration of America’s vanishing public sphere. Many of the individuals and groups represented at the PDF — from Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy and Joe Green of Essembly.com to large membership-based organizations such as Common Cause and the Service Employees International Union — are actively grappling with the issue.

Social networking phenomena like MySpace, along with such others as Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, are hot political models for activists these days. Spurred by their recent below-the-MSM-radar utility in high profile events, such as helping to turn out tens of thousands of immigrant protesters, user-generated social media have become an online organizer’s wet dream of democracy in action.

But is it real? Does it work? If so, how? And what does it mean? No one seems to know…

PDF editor Micah Sifry asked rhetorically if membership should be defined as dues-paying or merely having your name on a list of emails. Sifry also posited that, like Groucho Marx, “young people don’t like to think of themselves as ‘members’ of anything” — except perhaps of a social network in which they can control how much information flows and to whom.

That sounds about right to me – but its application in the real world of politics seems murky at best. My teenaged children, along with a handful of twenty-something friends, first turned me on to MySpace. Its vast reach - there are already tens of millions of registered users, with more signing on every day - and obvious potential to create social phenomena and sell related products impressed me as much as it did Rupert Murdoch, who then purchased it for a reported $580 million dollars. I even went so far as to register and create an online profile myself.

But I soon realized that MySpace really wasn’t “my space.” After all, the network I had tapped into wasn’t one I ordinarily socialized with – who but teens and tweens actually has the time to ‘hang out’ so extensively on line? I soon lost interest in maintaining my personal shrine.

I remain largely unconvinced of the actual utility of ‘such social networks’ in the marketplace of ideas and the real world of political engagement. But I could easily be proven wrong. Will the necessary renewal of public space somehow arise out of the ‘personalization’ of media and information? Can we practically transform ‘personal democracy’ into ‘interpersonal democracy?” Is ‘social networking” useful for more than just socializing, doing business and creating boy bands? Can MySpace, in effect, ever truly become OurSpace?

I’m not yet sure of the answers to the many questions raised in the PDF – but I am sure of one thing: they certainly won’t be answered by old-time media pundits and analysts like me any more than they will be by old-line Democratic or Republican Party activists and apparatchiks. Any answers, if and when they come, will emerge instead only from and through the very networks these activists are now naively attempting to manipulate.