Blue Flavor

Tunnels by Jeff Croft

MySpace: The Modern Day Pee-Chee

August 15th, 2006 at 11:42 a.m.

In junior high school, like most teenagers, I would doodle on my trusty Pee-Chee during Algebra. You know, the simple 59¢ yellow binder, adorned with various one color images of the basketball, baseball and football players.

Other than being a surface for my Bic pen to wander with my mind during a dull lecture, it served a more important purpose: it was an expression of who I am, my likes and dislikes. I would draw band logos, write phrases, sayings… anything that displayed who I am. As my classmates and I would walk down the halls, we would each have our Pee-Chee in arm, like advertisements to each other of our individuality or to recruit other like-minded people.

When people ask me what is the deal with MySpace? I reply: it’s just the modern day Pee-Chee.

Pee-CheeYou remember the Pee-Chee right? The rockers had AC/DC logos, the stoners had a huge pot leaf, the goths, well they would just make it completely black. And the nerds… they had Trapper Keepers. Hundreds of Pee-Chee’s would pass each other in the halls. By the end of the year, it would serve as a diary of boredom with the classic sports poses drawn over with afros, mustaches, filled in teeth and with hundreds of little doodles.

Remember that visual for a second.

Many of my peers ponder MySpace. In the past year it seems like it comes up in just about any conversation among web professionals. Why did News Corp. pay a bazillion dollars for it? Why do teens check their accounts upteen times per day? Why is it so friggin ugly? and the grandaddy: how does it work and how can I make it work for me?

Many attempt to explain the MySpace phenomenon, but believe me, no one has the answers. They can only speculate to it’s success. But like all good things, if we take a brief glance at the past, we can learn and identify patterns which tend to repeat over time.

In the case of MySpace, the marvelous Pee-Chee points us to some answers.

A Canvas to Express Interests

So what is it about the Pee-Chee folder that made it so compelling and the binder of choice for over 50 years? And how does it relate to MySpace? They both find success on the same concept: to express yourself.

20-years ago I had mastered the ability to draw band logos on my dear Pee-Chee. Logos from the Dead Milkman (remember the cow!), Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Red Hot Chili Peppers (when they used to be good), the classic DK logo, they all adorned my Pee-Chee. Like my peers or my elder brothers before me (who could draw a Chicago logo better than Peter Cetera), we would walked down the hall of my school holding our Pee-Chee’s as if it were a badge of honor pinned to our clothes.

The Pee-Chee was a blank canvas for us to literally illustrate our interests, to self classify ourselves among our peer groups. Together with how we dress and how we act, the Pee-Chee could be a conversation starter with peers of like-minded interests or it could purposefully be used to separate oneself or alienate others.

To be unique… just like everyone else

When I used to work in the mobile ringtone business, we used to say that the primary motivation to pay more for a ringtone than the actual song through iTunes was the value “to be unique… just like everyone else.” If I customize my ringtone to “Punk Rock Girl,” every time my phone rings, I express to all within earshot my musical taste. Almost as if, like the Pee-Chee 20-years ago, I can announce who I am through my musical taste.

Expressing yourself is an important part of being a young person. They live is a social caste system of popularity and physical awkwardness. They have to struggle with separating themselves from their parents, or what a psychiatrist would call the “primary relationship.” As all teens live a very similar routine, they need to rely on their interests to separate them from the masses.

This is where MySpace comes in.

The Digital Persona

For over 50 years, the Pee-Chee served as the advertisement of our “personal brand.” Along with how we dressed we could non-verbally communicate and self-classify ourselves, creating our physical persona. But in the Information Age we have more increasingly relied on creating our digital persona.

We all have a digital persona, though we may not think it, but how you write an email, or use instant messaging communicates who you through phrasing, grammar or vocabulary. The younger you are, the more important this alternate ego becomes.

With the Internet we are able to broaden our reach to fortifying our peer base, more easily finding like-minded people. Just as we would adorn band logos on our Pee-Chee’s before it, MySpace uses the six degrees of separation principle to add actual bands or musicians to our friends list create our own MySpace page, just like our Pee-Chee just a lot more times and on a much larger scale.

MySpace is about Music

The first 20-minutes of my first date with my wife was one of the most awkward span of time in my life. She was a customer at the coffee shop I worked at and she asked me out. We knew nothing about each other (except for the fact that she had a double-tall non-fat Mocha with whip each morning) and had a difficult time breaking the ice.

It was obvious our date was bombing fast. As a last ditch effort, she asked me, “what kind of music do you listen to?” We were married three months later, that was ten years ago this month.

It is easy to overlook that we often use music as a filter to discover other like-minded people just as it did for me and that cute mocha-girl 10 years ago. This has been going on for ages in the real world and but only now are we seeing it happen in the digital world. When looking at the MySpace phenomenon, especially if you are looking to attempt to duplicate its success, it is important to remember that at the center of the MySpace universe is music.

Adding a band or musician to our MySpace friends list exposes us to our peers that also like that band. The more bands we add, the more likely it becomes to narrow down our pool or potential peers to actual people we find a connection with.

Just like the Pee-Chee, we are able to collect our favorite bands and display them on our MySpace page, creating the same value and desired effect as carrying the Pee-Chee in the school hallway, just on a massive scale.

Also like the Pee-Chee, MySpace pages are not a work of art.

It’s Cheap, therefore Disposable

Remember that visual of the Pee-Chee I told you to hang on to, now go find your average MySpace page, like this one, this one, or this one. Can you see the resemblance to a Pee-Chee?

Many dismiss MySpace pages for being ugly and unusable, which I cannot disagree. But the value of creating the digital persona far outweighs the esthetics. My Pee-Chee in high-school was never pretty, but I cared for it all the same. Toward the end of the year my Pee-Chee would be in tatters, (if it even made it that far) with barely a quarter-inch of free space to draw on.

My Pee-Chee didn’t need to be pretty, it served it’s purpose and did its job reflecting my personality and communicating who I am. MySpace is very similar, it doesn’t need to look good to serve its desired function.

Though each summer as the school year would come to a close, I would dispose of my Pee-Chee without a care. It was cheap and would be replaced easily come the fall as each school year was a new opportunity to define myself.

MySpace could easily suffer the same fate. The youth audience is fickle, jaded and temperamental with technology. As Fox expands the model and MySpace’s revenue potential, it runs the risk of moving to far away from the value, from the music.

Only time will time if MySpace can make it work at a large scale, but sticking to the goal of providing teens a canvas to express ones self, especially through the use of bands and musicians, is the key to its current and future success.

What can you learn from MySpace (or Pee-Chee)?

This is what we call people-centered design, building solutions around people, or putting problems before solutions. Knowing what need do you fill and creating something to fill it. Often this very simple solution will do far more than billions in acquisition could ever do.

MySpace currently does this very well, hence its success. You may not get MySpace, but it does work and it does serve a purpose, just as the Pee-Chee did before it. But for how long? Will Fox make it better or make it worse? Will an upstart come along a steal MySpace’s thunder?

But the real question you should be asking yourself is: when was the last time you saw a Pee-Chee?

Postscript: More Ugly MySpace pages

In preparation of this post, I asked everyone in the office to provide three of the ugliest MySpace pages they could find in 10 minutes. We found too many to not tack on here.

Brian Fling

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