Struggling with Myspace

Posted February 18, 2006 * Comments(2)

I’ve been working a lot lately on trying to articulate my message about what myspace is all about and what my response is when asked about it (or asked about filtering it).

Then, I came across this post at Ed-Tech Insider in my newsreader that sums it up nicely:

It isn’t just MySpace.com that we need to be concerned about, it is any web site that students tend to use. The predators, scam artists, etc. will follow. We need to teach students safe, appropriate use of the Internet rather than just block them from these sites.

We block MySpace.com and Xanga.com to keep kids from reading and posting during the school day, but you can’t stop them from posting when they are at home, and you can’t enforce school discipline on them for what they post at home.

I’m against the filtering and blocking of websites in general, for this reason. If we can’t educate kids about these sites, what’s going to happen when they leave school?

2 Comments so far

  1. I'll Go Anonymous on February 20th, 2006

    I just felt that I should add my $.02 on this issue, since I represent the generation most affected by the problems these sites, the 10-18 age range. Just for some background, I consider myself pretty above my friends when it comes to matters of computers. Colianni will probably notice who I am because of the email address I provided, but I’m cool with that.

    In general, I don’t think that schools, administrators, or parents should be concerned about these “evil” sites. I understand where you come from, but MySpace, Xanga, and other social networking sites are much less of a problem than more traditional problems, like underage drinking or such related things. Furthermore, I wholly agree with Colianni when he says that blocking does nothing. My reasons for this are two-fold:

    We kids have already had it pounded into us that you can’t trust people on the Internet. If we haven’t, our friends have.

    Unfortunately, we know how to get around your blocking.

    We already know that we can’t trust what we see on the Internet. In fact, we have it so pounded into our heads that there is already an anti-MySpace movement going on. Kids read the news too, and though pathetic as the movements are (one has a whopping four members), we see the problems with MySpace and we choose to continue with it because we feel that we can be safe, and I think that we actually can be. Which leads to my next point:

    Kids use MySpace to keep in contact with their friends.

    We, in large, don’t go out to find new people on MySpace, nor do we accept friends that we haven’t seen in real life. To illustrate this point, let me steal this from a friend’s MySpace:
    “I use MySpace to keep in touch with the people that I know personally. I’m not here to meet new people over the Internet.”
    Also, browsing through my friend’s MySpaces, I have yet to find one that has friends listed whom I don’t know. I haven’t done extensive research to look at other high schools, but I’d bet money that they do the same. People who use MySpace irresponsibly are just as likely to become a statistic in a different way. It’s silly to say that MySpace is a fad that will become a bigger problem than the ones we already have.

    Finally, to deal with one myth: Kids aren’t stupid when it comes to computers. Like I said earlier, I feel that I am above kids when it comes to knowledge of computers, but almost every kid knows at least two proxy sites to still view MySpace or Xanga. My favorites to get around blocking are google (use their language tools) and nyud.net (adding .nyud.net:8090 to any domain name is a sure way to get to that site.) In general, the only thing that blocking does is prevent us from logging in and posting comments, which I think would actually be safer when we are surrounded by our friends looking over our shoulders in school than at home, when we can be secretive and not tell anyone.

    I understand where school administrators come from, blocking these sites, but I think that you should educate us, as Colianni said, instead of just slowing us down, making us post at home.

    I will step down from my soapbox now, and thanks for reading.

  2. I'll Go Anonymous on February 20th, 2006

    I apoligize for the formatting of my comment, something got lost in the translation. It was sectioned off into nice paragraphs before, so don’t let that dissuade you.