Myspace Sehnsucht
Written by Stephen Lee Naish, a guest writer, and edited by Stephanie, our editor-in-chief.
The German noun Sehnsucht roughly translates to a “longing for an unfulfilled experience”, a " ‘lost’ future that never materialized”, or “a ‘lost’ time that was gone so quickly it was only captured in a fleeting glimpse”. It is a vague yet frustrating notion of a world that could have existed differently from the one we have. It is now forever out of reach. The past is pushed away by the relentless path of “progress” of our chosen future. There is also a rather beautiful Welsh language term, Hiraeth, similar to Sehnsucht, that encompasses a kind of homesickness or longing to return to the past, but in a Welsh context. The hills and valleys are calling. Across the world, there are similar words for feelings that can't quite be fully defined. They are all deeply melancholic and tinged with nostalgia for something that may have briefly existed in or before the lifetime of those that experience such sensations. It is romantically sad that a version of reality has vanished.
Weirdly, I think about Sehnsucht in the context of Myspace and the “lost” ideals of early social media. I’ve certainly been longing for those early experiences as one particular billionaire first made it known his desire to purchase Twitter and begin a campaign of divide and conquer among users.
Let me tell you about my experience of Myspace, which is, I’m fully aware, filtered through the lens of white, cis male experiences. For a brief time, it was beautiful. My one and only goal during my time there was to explore, engage, and feed off the creativity of others. Friends, yes, but also complete strangers living in countries I’d never visit. I connected with artists, avant-garde musicians, filmmakers, bands, writers, and philosophers. They were all within reach and accessible. Messages and comments acknowledged. Myspace felt like the promise of the “people's internet” come to fruition. A glorious time that zipped by in a flash and was over before it really began.
As an early experiment in social media, Myspace was a wonderful place for ideas, shared interests, and creativity. A user could share their music, their short films, their art, and be “seen” for it. Many mainstream artists working today such as Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, and Nicki Minaj found fame and recognition by posting their music to Myspace and engaging with their initial audience. Smaller bands and artists got a serious leg-up in the industry by being “discovered” on the site and making important connections.
Politics, at least in my echo chamber, was limited. When it did intrude, it was usually through a flashy profile background image (my background of George W. Bush standing next to the slogan “United We Fall” didn’t last long; I’m not even American). Hardly anyone spoke up about their political affiliations, although thinking back to the era prior to the 2008 financial crash, many were, including me, somewhat apolitical.
My early rumblings of writing and experimental filmmaking made their debut on Myspace. It was a place to stumble and fall, fail or succeed without any real external pressure. Myspace felt utopic. A space on the internet where your inner self became "the self".
The brief majesty of Myspace shattered soon enough. The site was infested with predators, trolls, and lurkers. Useless updates, commercial marketing interference, and users jumping off to populate Facebook made it unwieldy and cluttered. The abandoned profiles were left to rot in plain sight. All the evidence of artistic exchange left lingering forever. Or, until the administrators of the site simply pressed reset.
We can never have peak Myspace back. It left us when we left it and tumbled into the unrelenting feeds of Facebook and Twitter where creativity and artistic expression, even a friendly exchange, are often jettisoned and replaced with a hellscape of extreme political opinions, oversaturated memes, racism, transphobia, misogyny, and epic trolling for LOLs. There are still glimpses of the utopic ideals of early social media present in FB and Twitter, of course, and these ideals are worth holding on to steadfastly, but the maw of endless posting is ultimately overwhelming and dilutes what we might have originally come for. All the time there is that sense of Sehnsucht or Hiraeth. A knowledge of a future not taken, abandoned, and now lost for good.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This piece was written by one of our guest writers, Stephen Lee Naish. Reach him at @RiffsandMeaning.
This piece was edited by our editor-in-chief, Stephanie.
