Mopping The Ocean

Moving to LA from Denver has been a cultural baptism of sorts. While the look of many commercial buildings and cars and boulevards is disorienting-ly familiar, the rest of the city brims with voices, people, plants, and advertising that are anything but. The daily exposure to a diverse population has been overwhelming and reassuring. Somehow standing in line for take out in a Thai restaurant staffed by Korean- Anglo- and, Japanese-Americans with a crowd of patrons consisting of a gaggle of gay Aussies, a pair of botoxed British ladies, and several African-American couples causes me to feel more clearly defined. Defined as what, I'm not sure, but the feeling of definition is there.

This exposure to human diversity also involves my employment experiences here. Recently I was hired as a temp at MySpace. MySpace, for those of you who don't know, is a free, on-line social networking and promotion website started two years ago as a little marketing tool for a guy who wanted some exposure for his "emo" rock band. It is currently exploding on a global scale as "the" on-line social source. Each user creates a personal page about themselves, their band, or their group and then has access to a unique social resource and a variety of networking opportunities. Mostly it's a fun way to put a kind of visual, musical, and verbal advertisement of your self on the Internet.

The service is free to users, but advertisers pay a lot of money to have their products and services promoted on the user's pages and that's where content monitors (and my temp job) come in. Advertisers would rather not have their banners and videos playing along side pictures of, say, someone engaged in serious scat play or footage of a particularly gristly beheading or a photo of someone dressed up like Hitler (and not in that arty, ironic way, but really...dressed like Hitler...to, you know, keep the dream alive). So MySpace is currently in the process of expanding its content management and customer service departments in order to deal with the explosion of content being loaded onto the 10 million and growing user pages.

Most of the still and videos images being added to user pages are of vacations or new babies or new boyfriends. But there is a certain persistent percentage of users who see their MySpace page as a sort of private TV channel and/or magazine to be used to share or promote their interests in racism, homophobia, violence, bestiality, hard core porn, and slander - or to promote their sex for hire services or questionable offers for cheap real estate and hair re-growing products. As a customer service representative in the "content" department my job was to sift through and delete images that had been flagged by other monitors or users or to find and delete questionable images and pages using random searches of the entire data base of users.

At the orientation the group I was with was told that there were no official, printed up guidelines for what was acceptable or unacceptable content for a MySpace page. Instead we were treated to several examples of what was not allowed (the beheading and scat mentioned earlier) and what was allowed. At one point it became a type of game show with questionable images being projected on a blank wall while the new employees were encouraged to yell out whether or not they were acceptable. "Are you sure that's not acceptable? Yes, she's naked, but can you SEE her areola?" Later the lady orientating us projected an example of acceptable content on the wall. It was a graphic story about a man and his interest in submissive, scatological, sex with African-american women. The lady read the entire story emphasizing the more graphic words and sentences. There were no pictures and because of that it was considered acceptable. I made a note in my notebook, "Why are pictures of bad things worse than the words used to describe them? How does this relate to democracy?" Okay, okay, but I HAD worked another job that day and a rapid stream of strange images had been pummeling my mind for two hours.

Simulated sex was unacceptable, even between a stuffed bunny rabbit and a teddy bear. But simulated violence was fine. If you could somehow determine that the blood in a picture was stage blood, the picture could stay. "Crack is whack,” our enthusiastic guide through these loud images told us. "No bear bottoms, but if she's wearing a thong and the back of the thong, no matter how thin, covers her anus, then it's an acceptable picture." Before we knew it the four-hour orientation had come to an end and we were assigned shifts and sent home.

The work was tedious and performed in a dingy room full of low-end cubicles and clunky desktop computers. And to make the illusive content policy even more confusing a number of ever changing managers whom we were to refer questions to, seemed to have differing views on what was and what was not acceptable. The best option was to just decide for your self. This freedom along with the ability to delete user pages from MySpace, allowed a number of employees to exact cyber revenge on their enemies or any user they deemed unworthy. My fellow employees were mostly actors, models, or musicians looking for flexible, easy work and most of them were younger than me. It was an interesting cross-section of Angelinos that left me feeling my Utah roots like nothing else before it had. Eventually I landed in the e-mail department, which wasn't as unsavory (well, there was that one day with eel porn…), but was still in the midst of fumbling its way through giant growth spurt that no one seemed prepared for.

About a week in I got a giant zit under my left eye and my left eyeball started leaking...whatever it is eyeballs leak when they’re not leaking tears. According to certain spiritual beliefs the left side of the body is the receiving side and the right side is the giving side. I decided that my minor left side ailments were the result of receiving a huge diet of visual garbage for eight hours a day. Finally it was the traffic that broke me. The office was across town and at best the commute was an hour, the worst was a hellish two hour journey of epic proportions.

I applied for and landed a part time job with Second City and quit Myspace immediately.
Sometimes exposure to the diversity of human beings and their interests can stimulate excitement and compassion and sometimes it can only cause the heart and mind to stop, anvil-to-the-head style, and desperately begin the search for what is familiar and comprehensible.