Somewhere in the 2005-08 time period, I would play poker every Monday night at my friend Aaron’s house with generally the same group of guys — a great group from many different walks of life, whose common link was knowing Aaron, who was at that time a bartender in town.
There were quite a few characters amongst the group, but one of them went by “Skip” and I remember distinctly one night of poker talking about social media and I asked Skip if he was on MySpace and he said “nah, I’m on SkipSpace.”
It was a throwaway comment at the time, but it wasn’t long after that Twitter was gaining in popularity. My first introduction to Twitter came from one of my college journalism professors, Nancy Williams, who would almost daily it seem update her Facebook status to say she was “twittering.” I wondered what this was all about, and in late 2007/early 2008 I joined Twitter. When it came time to choose a username for the microblogging site, the MySpace conversation with Skip stuck in my head. MySpace. SkipSpace…*lightbulb*…TySpace.
TySpace became my identity on Twitter from the day of signup until some point years later when that account got banned (I’ve had several Twitter accounts banned, and that will be a blog post for another day). I unfortunately don’t have access to the Twitter username now, and certainly don’t own tyspace.com (but would be willing to pay if the owner of it, who appears to be using it for nothing, would like to sell) but as I look to embark on my 31st attempt at creating a blog, I really feel comfortable using the “tyspace” branding — especially since I can marry it up with a nifty MySpace-esque theme from WordPress.
The nostalgia of MySpace feels a lot stronger these days. MySpace was one of the early introductions we had as a society to “social media” and the biggest controversies that arose from the site were when you chose to dump a friend from your “top 8”. In the years since we have seen Facebook and Twitter both uniquely but substantially contribute to harming Democracy, and now modern social networks like TikTok are re-wiring the brains of its users to have low attention spans and believe that the most desired career to have as an adult is that of an “influencer.”
No, MySpace was a simpler time in the most legitimate sense, and it is a time I wish we could get back to. When being able to network with friends and communicate more easily was a joy, not a burden.
So with that, welcome to tyspace — I will share more in future posts about the type of content I hope to write and share on this platform, but I am hopeful that evoking the look and feel of that digital security blanket of yesteryear can be but one of the joys of accessing this site in the future.