Background
Myspace has become immensely popular over the last couple of years. It has given anybody and everybody a chance to be represented on the web. Myspace has allowed millions of people to have their own personalized interactive website for free. Myspace users do not need any special software or skills to create their own webpage.
Myspace is a powerful tool for communication. I believe Myspace will only become more popular. Younger generations growing up with Myspace use it in their day to day life and rely on it as one way of communicating to their friends. The potential of Myspace is so great, I see it as only gaining in popularity and becoming more and more common in our daily lives.
There are other services similar to Myspace. However Myspace seems to be the most successful in attracting users. At the moment, Myspace is free to everyone. This may change in the future as our digital society becomes more permission based. Since Myspace is still free and chaotic with very few rules, I chose this computing society to place my intervention.
Intervention
I created a Myspace page for an inanimate object, a windshield wiper. I don't claim to be the first to create this type of page, but I tried to take the idea further by using photos and accurate details.
The idea of a windshield wiper keeping there own website is certainly a surreal one. This is what attracted me to the idea in the first place. It is also interesting to consider the future of the internet and it's relationship with inanimate objects. Many theorists have speculated about what the internet is capable of when it interacts with lifeless objects. We already have webcams that automatically update themselves on the web. More and more objects will relay data to the internet, making whatever calculations they're capable of available to the globe.
When I created the page, I didn't go out and find friends. I wanted to see if anyone would find the windshield wiper page on thier own. After waiting a while for someone to contact the wiper, I decided it would be more interesting to find and add friends myself. So I used the Myspace browse option to find random people to see if they wanted to be wiper's friend. People showed interest by accepting friend requests and even writing to the windshield wiper.
Conclusion
I think it's absurd to see people willing to befriend a windshield wiper. I know that popularity in our society is highly rated and on Myspace, people often want to inflate the number of "friends" they have to appear more popular. This explains why people had no problem accepting the wiper as a friend. However I think it's very funny that people have become so engulfed in this online community that they are willing to publicly admit to being "friends" with a windshield wiper.
As of October 18th, 2006, Windshield Wiper has 43 friends. Eight people have sent messages to the wiper, and four people have left comments on the wiper's page.