Back when I wanted to be a rockstar.

Me and my old high school crowd circa 1998.

When I was a teen:

• I watched Beavis and Butthead. 
• “Gangsta’s Paradise” was totally my jam for like three months straight.
• I believed everything I saw in Vh1’s Behind the Music.
• My logic was guided by hormones much more than I’d like to admit.
• I was a relative nincompoop compared to who I am now (I’m still a bit of a nincompoop).

Point being, that an analysis of teen migration from one social network to another seems trite on the surface, but I remember the transition from MySpace to Facebook, and I think Boyd might have some valid ideas.

Ye old band playing one of many shows in downtown Nashville. I like to think that my singing was so awesome that the camera girl couldn’t hold the camera strait, but sadly this was not the case.

Back in mid 2000’s, I was using MySpace to promote my music and my girlfriend who was a white upper middle class and attending university was on Facebook. At the time I was a starving musician, barely signed to a label, working in restaurants to make up the difference, and mindful of not associating myself with anything that could damage my “street cred” as a suffering musician.  I saw Facebook as the enemy to everything that I stood for.  MySpace gave us the ability to express ourselves by giving us access to the source code of the page, while Facebook constricted our design choices to whatever Mr. Zuckerburg found appropriate. MySpace was the social network equivalent to the right to free speech.

My perception of MySpace’s street cred in comparison to  Facebook’s blue and white ivory tower seems to reflect the white flight that Boyd describes. I am certainly a byproduct of an upper middle class childhood; however my time in the music world as afforded me some perspective that many of my friends in the picture in the top right have not experienced.

The old Brothers Bentley MySpace page hasn’t been updated since the band broke up in 2007 and that most of the information we had published has disappeared as MySpace has become more “Facebook like” in its organization, leaving only a shell of a page behind. Our MySpace page is as vacant as foreclosed house in a dying neighborhood.