It's a tribute to the super-sexualism of a sexually confused society that one of the most popular explanations for the explosive growth of Myspace system dwells on sex.

The popular culture pundits are fond of describing the short-cut boy meets girl adventures as Myspace's raison d'etre. In fact, as I can attest from the experiences of the young men on my staff here, such adventures are rampant.

I suppose that would okay in and of itself (people need to meet after all) but nothing in our society is ever "in and of itself". Ours is a culture of reflections, a room of mirrors that offers us brief glimpses of reality while all too often distorting it and clouding it with the fuzz of misrepresentation.

You have to stand still for a few moments, take a deep breath and really observe. And when we observe, perhaps there's an important lesson here for our movement about the Internet because the Myspace phenomenon is something we just can't ignore.

Essentially, Myspace is a kind of digital masked ball in which everyone creates his or her own identity and then runs around filling the dance card at Internet speed. You can be, for a time anyway, anything you want and in most cases what people are on Myspace is probably not quite what they are in real life.

But the issue for me isn't that Myspace perverts reality because, in this society, reality is itself perverted. The social grouping of people occurs through so many twisting filters that meeting someone for whatever reason - even for something as painless and safe as a chat - becomes a procedure dotted with criteria that, in the end, mean very little about the person. Body type, look, work-life, style of dress, interests, politics...well...you get my point. Ours is a society that tosses so much baggage on social relationships that we often end up losing out on building them.

There are so many reasons to not get together that we have become accustomed to a crippling alienation.

I think Myspace's popularity is that it offers people the opportunity to cut through that alientation and the urge to do so is powerful. The pathetic fact that people have to pose as what they're not to do it isn't an indictment of them or, in truth, Myspace; it's an indictment of our society.

Myspace is nothing more than an unfortunate compromise with the restrictive culture of an oppressively crippled society whose popular culture is built on our inadequacies, fears and alienation.

Now, mind you, I am NOT saying that we should create a Myspace of the left. I mean, maybe we should but it wouldn't be a Myspace if we did it right. I think the point for our movement is that the Internet offers us the potential to address the need people are showing and to do so constructively and progressively.

In practice, we have seen the remarkable unifying of people through many of the website campaigns that have turned political culture on its head in this country. Since we mention these all over the place on this site, I won't do a list. But you know what I mean.

Think about this. Many of the people brought together by those sites would never have known each other or made a gesture toward getting to know each other had it not been for the Internet.

I have a buddy in Florida, a middle-aged man like myself who grew up here in the Brooklyn neighborhood I live in. This guy spends part of each day on the New York Times site discussing politics with people from all over the country. He's gotten to know many of them. Some are now his friends. They differ with him in virtually every way; there would have been no relationship in "real life". But on the Internet these folks are brought together by one interest: they like to talk politics and they miss each other when one isn't on-line for a day.

Make no mistake, these are real relationships. These people learn about each other, ask about lives, talk about backgrounds, difficulties and triumphs. They develop full, human relationships.

Are these substitutes for face to face relationships. No. But that's apples and oranges because there would be no face to face relationship without the Internet anyway. These are new kinds of relationships.

I often say that the Internet work people do is, in and of itself, political work. It may seem obvious but when people think about that they find it kind of startling. We've been taught, as a movement, that the Internet is only a tool for expressing our thinking and organizing around our issues. And it is. A good tool.

But the very act of using it for that purpose, the experience of being brought together in this world of zinging packets over phone lines, can be a deeply transforming and socially productive one. It's organizing on levels and against oppressions that we have, up to now, not been able to work on. It has opened an entirely new level and arena of progressive work.

I've no idea where all this is going. History has a way of answering questions no matter what each of us thinks the answer may end up being. But here's one question to ask and think about:

Sure, Myspace is alienated behavior. But much, in not most, of what we do in this society is alienated and alienating. What is it that makes so many people choose this alienated behavior over others that are available? And what can we, as a movement, do to address whatever it is they're seeking in a non-alienated way.

It's a question worth exploring and an answer worth pursuing.