Myspace

I'm not a parent, but this seems like a no-brainer to me.

Computer use at 14 is a priveledge. Unless you are living on your own, paying your own bills, and out of the house - you as a teen have a certain responsibility to respect your parents wishes. Within reason, but teens are constantly pushing the limit anyhow.

It's up to parents to say what is what. No Myspace use. There is no need for a 14 yr old to use MySpace anyways. It's advertising to people you do not know. It's not going to traumatize the kid to have to go without it. Sheesh.

It cracks me up how some people figure a teen has a right to whatever is available on the internet or otherwise. Like they are entitled to it, and parents and others should dance around to make sure they don't squish their rights.

Not that long ago this wasn't even an issue. If you as a teen wanted to Advertise your goods to the Free World and get all that free marketing, you had to run away from home or make a lot of phone calls! All easily detectible by your folks.

Seriously. Just bc technology is speeding along, doesn't mean a kid should be immersed in it and expected to have the level of judgement/responsibility of an adult. Cut them off! Or taper their computer use.

Even if I trusted a teen 100% (and I have some cousins I trust pretty close to this, who are pretty much like sisters) - I would worry about even an innocent spot on Myspace. It's like giving a kid a machine gun before they have learned basic safety and what other people do with guns.

My sweet cousin of 16 refuses to use MySpace. Her words "It's stupid. Any old pervert could start bothering me. I can talk to my friends on IM or the phone."

Makes sense to me.

I dont think you quite 'get' MySpace, I mean, what its used for. (Thats ok, I didnt know either until a while ago - it wasnt exactly set up with our generation in mind, after all).

I set up my own page and browsed around for a while now, and it looks to me like its rarely ever used for "advertising to people you dont know".

"Advertising your goods" as "free marketing", if you mean that literally, doesnt apply in any case - its not eBay.

And apart from comments on the pages of bands, comedians etc, 90% of the personal comments and messages that are exchanged also appear to be made among real-life friends, or their equivalents.

Ive seen a coupla times that when some stranger did post a comment on someone's blog or the like and it seemed iffy, the kids quickly turned on him asking who are you, what do you want?

And of course you can control whom you accept as "Friend" or not, whom you allow to post comments to your blog or your photos, or who gets to see them for that matter; you can even set your whole profile to "private" so noone but the people you've accepted as "friends" gets to see it. Theres a bunch of useful privacy tools that you can use (and that parents can recommend their teens).


Hmm except then you cant share photos with all your friends, or be in each others top 8, or follow whats going on with who's posting on whose page; you cant write your blogs for others to follow and give you kudos on, you cant look up the free tracks and fan info of all your favourite bands that are on there too or put their tracks on your page...

Look - for us, being over 20, much of that may sound pretty silly, and like any proper adult we might say, "well what could possibly be so important about that". But i think we only need to dig a little in our own memory of stuff we and our friends used to do and share and talk about when we were teens, and how important it all was - and we'll understand again. Being out the loop is like, lethal, man - purgatory, when you're a teen!

Basically, these kids are practicing at forming and functioning in social networks, and in fact - and here I'll just go straight against the received truth in a thread like this - in many ways online communities are probably safer practicing grounds than your usual streetcorner or snackbar or playground or plot of land that teens will hang out on after school. Its like dry swimming.

I mean, I know that


But that definitely's a bit of an overstatement. There's over 100,000,000 user accounts on MySpace. Even with a measure of duplicates that means 10s of millions of people who got on there at some time. Now there's been a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps five dozen stories if you count internationally, in the news of kids having gotten in trouble on MySpace. Even if its a multiple of that, that still means that the odds of getting into serious harm are well this way of the chance of getting in a car crash when you board the family car.

They're still well below the odds of being sexually harassed by a family member or friend of the family, for that matter; thats where a lot more of the danger is, though we prefer not to reflect on that, and localise the perception of danger in the big outside world instead.

I guess what this is about is the perennial, instinctual fear or suspicion that adults / parents have of those teen things they dont share in or understand. Its tough, if you're used to making sure everything is good for your own kid, to notice that (s)he starts going off into social domains you dont have a grip on. Honest concern quickly mushrooms suspicions of what all happens out there, when it concerns spaces you do not yourself understand. It was no different for yesteryear's parents faced with their kids going to the dance, or a concert, or a sleep-over party, or the like.

Thing is, 14 is plenty old in today's world. Kids are having sex when they're 14, they're faced with a bunch of things that even just one generation earlier did not half get. Coping with the possible pitfalls of an online environment isnt too much to learn to do, in comparison - and the MySpace guidelines do offer a good starter-point for teens and parents to start talking about it.

Though the kid would probably be embarassed, I think its cool if a parent takes his/her own MySpace account to find out what its about - I mean, refraining from leaving comments on her/his kid's page of course ;-) - cause that way (s)he knows what issues are useful to talk about with the kid. And that will do a bunch more for the teen's capabilities to be sufficiently assertive and wary than just being kept away from it.

Nimh,

Please don't treat me like I am retarded. Especially to try to give weight to your opinion.

I'm not going to counter it, because frankly, it's not worth it.

I stated an opinion, I stick to it and still feel that way.

Toodles.

I am sorry I made you feel like I made you out to be retarded. I certainly dont think you are.

I dont actually know what in my post made you feel that way. I've reread my whole post, and I dont see what could be taken as disrespectful, let alone as making out like you're retarded. Was it that I wrote that "I dont think you quite 'get' MySpace"? I already pointed out that neither did I, until just recently. Its hardly a shame to not know the goings-on of what is mostly a teen hangout site. No offence was certainly intended. I dont understand eBay, and I dont feel like a retard about that.

As for making out like "Myspace [is] like giving a kid a machine gun", however, I honestly think that's a totally disproportional comparison. Considering the number of teen MySpace users and the relative odds of running into trouble, driving a car is more dangerous than that. If you stick by that comparison, thats your right, but I just wonder how you would argue that.