Faceless Dangers...Is MySpace the New Boogie Man?

Why are parents so freaked out about the life on teens on the most popular friendship and networking site of 2006, MySpace?  Most people over 30 hadn't even heard of it until six months ago, maybe.  MySpace relies on its users volunteering personal information and photos of themselves  and posting them on the Web for all to see,  celebrating the interests of individuals beyond work and school. 

Personas are created in the online communities.  As Yves Duel said last week in Le Monde, "ce nouveau type de relations sociales, qui permet des allers et retours entre la vie reelle et la vie virtuelle...." (translated: this new type of social relation that permits coming and going between real and virtual life).

A Knight-Ridder story  warns about the new platform giving "teens a global stage on which to embarrass themselves and abuse their peers."  MySpace.com and the smaller Xanga, Facebook, Friendster, and LiveJournal have exploded.  MySpace  - more than 90 percent between age 14 and 30 - is adding members at the rate of 150,000 each day.

Forget about warning kids about the perils of "cruising Main Street."  The national college sorority Pi Beta Phi addressed the issue of the pitfalls of online representation on these community sites last fall.  High school students are being warned that admissions counselors are cruising online sites as part of the college application process. Now stories are percolating up   like a ghost coming out from under the bed. NBC's Dateline fanned the flames with a spooky series, Why parents must mind MySpace.  Stories include:  molesters and murders, the site being called a "den of evil,"  and Playboy's current feature "The Girls of MySpace" promoting new girls every day and sexy Internet hookup tales.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace last year for $580 million in cash.  Started just over two years ago, 1/4 of its registered users are minors. Murdoch is planning to expand MySpace internationally and on wireless devices and adding video sharing, becoming more like a Web portal.

It is a great place for aspiring musicians to expose new audiences to their music.  MySpace has its own recording lable.  It is an easy networking tool. Probably the most important thing is that in a structured-play age, it is the one place where kids don't have parents hovering.  At least not yet.   

It is being called the great MySpace crackdown of '06 and stories are hitting the front pages.  Do we just need something else to be anxious about?  Is it just the Big, Bad Boogie Bear of the moment?

MySpace is one of the hottest online sites, beating e-Bay, Google and Amazon.com in the number of page views in December, according to USA Today.   It now ranks 13th among all sites, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. ComScore Media Metrix places it fourth by total page views, two notches above Google and has 50 million members. 

Virtual communities are places to create faces, spaces and places; a very postmodern and fluid construct. Here's a great chat about the hubub, mostly by those most familiar with MySpace, in response to the Dateline furor.   A MySpace Cheat Sheet for Parents might help to calm the furor.

 

Comments

[Hattie]

The Dateline story posts a poll featuring live votes: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11064451/#survey

The majority, 56%, think both parents and tech web sites need to step up and be responsible for guarding teens' online safety. Surprisingly, only 6% thought the sites should have better monitoring.

[Leslie -- Lubbock]

Some of these things do cause anxiety because we hear or experience the stories as parents and then have to figure out the answers or how to guide our children through these issues. Maybe a child wants to document feelings online and regrets it afterwards when feelings change...The boundaries between public and private are not understood?

[Sarah B.]

My daughter had no idea until I talked to her about how permanent the record can be compared to the transient nature of her feelings, which can change overnight.

She didn't understand the "cacheing" (am I spelling this right?) nature of these sites. Will she regret something years later, like Paris Hilton now regrets (or maybe not) leaving her diaries in a storage unit where the bill forgot to be paid and legally the diary is no longer in her hands/under her ownership?

I explained to my daughter that what she writes online is like Paris Hilton's diary. It is potentially open for all to read.

So yes, it is important that as parents and adults that we understand these new structures enough to explain the dangers and facts to the NextGen.