http://www.wowmuseum.com/images/Exhibit ... ladies.jpg
My Space
for release 04-16-06
Washington D.C.
Not since LSD and pelvic gyrating rock-n-roll or underaged raves soaked in beer and ecstasy have parents been so alarmed about a social phenomenon as they are about MySpace.com, the social networking website that is white-hot right now. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for over half a billion bucks last year. He knows a hot property when he sees it.
Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but The Poet's Eye has noticed that in the past couple of weeks, you can't turn on the television without seeing a story about MySpace and sexual predators on one of the major networks (except for Fox, which is owned by Murdoch.) It's an effective competitive technique. Link your rivals with pederasty and scandal.
My Space has become the fear du jour. Any parent with a teenaged child is imagining snakes and devils and raging pedophiles boiling out of the screen of the family PC.
Let's get real about this, people. This is the twenty-first century. The internet has become a large part of our lives, especially if we are young and culturally literate. Every middle-school student has access to the internet. And that's a good thing. At their fingertips they have the benefit of a vast compendium of knowledge and reference material. And also games and entertainment and tools for social interaction, places like MySpace and dozens of other online community sites and bulletin boards.
When my teen-aged cultural consultant has her friends over to the house, they will cluster about the computer and click around on the My Space site and giggle and gossip with their friends. They flirt with the boys and they are catty to the girls who aren't in their crowd, you know, the same things that teenager's do in real life. They talk trash the same way they would on the playground or at the mall when they are surrounded by their peers rather than their parents.
You can't turn on the evening news lately without hearing a story designed to stoke the natural concern that parents have for their children into a lathered hysteria and a fear that every time their child touches the mouse, he or she is in imminent danger of being pounced upon by a predator. Fear and paranoia sell almost as well as sex and violence. We live in a culture that runs on fear. We are afraid of acid reflux disease and erectile dysfunction and WMDs and the nuclear threat from Iran and brown-skinned immigrants and bird flu or that the Second Coming of Jesus is going to catch us with our pants down. When Jesus comes again, will he have a profile on MySpace? Probably.
There are something like 70 million members of MySpace. In any community that large you are surely going to have some bad apples. But the fact is that your child is probably in more danger of being preyed upon sexually in a Catholic church or in a Boy Scout troupe or at a movie theater (where it's, oh my god, dark} or over at Uncle Ernie's, than on MySpace.
Now, if your teenaged daughter is going down to the Motel Six to meet her new friend, SilverFox, that she met on the internet, you might need to take a step back. Some remedial training is in order for both you and your kid. It's just common sense alloyed with a little technical savvy. These are the things that you need to tell them:
1. Forget about privacy on the internet. The Fourth Amendment is dead. It's so 19th Century to think that we are by any means "secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Everything posted on the net is searchable or retrievable. The NSA is reading your email. The government, the credit card companies, your ex or your parents can read it all. They don't even have to bust the lock on your diary.
2. The internet is much like the real world. There are mostly good people and a few bad ones. In person, it is somewhat easier to distinguish between the two. You have appearance, body language, tone of voice, smell and other signs to help you determine who is likely to cause you harm. But the internet is a world of trap-doors and one-way mirrors and false identities. On the internet I can tell you that I am a sixteen year old girl with perky boobies and bedroom eyes, but I could hardly pull that off in person. Tell your children that things are not always as they seem.
3. Don't give out your private information and don't talk to strangers. This is the same thing you would tell your child about the real world.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Justice Department report that one of every five young people ages 10 to 17 surveyed said they had received a sexual solicitation over the Internet in the previous year. I'm here to tell you that any attractive sixteen year old walking to school or in the mall or talking to his or her friends on the telephone has had a sexual solicitation in the past week. Most of these solicitations are between consenting minors. Don't panic.
There are several ways you can protect your child on the internet.
You can take what I call the Amish approach. This means that you try to protect your children from the technology itself. You forbid internet use. But this is like making your kids ride around in horse drawn buggies and having no television or indoor plumbing.
There is the Big Brother approach. You can use filters and spy technology to monitor every keystroke that your child makes, or literally stand over their shoulders and watch where they go on the internet. This approach is exhausting for all involved, plus it is doomed to failure because there are many, many more computers available to your child than you could ever keep track of. They are in the schools, the libraries, at every friend's house and at the Kinko's.
Then there is the Good Sense approach. First establish an atmosphere of openness in which your child is willing to share with you what they are doing in their lives, especially on the internet. Arm your children with the correct knowledge about the internet and life in general. Alert them to the hazards. Teach them when it is time to call for help. They will make mistakes, that's part of growing up, but at least teach them about card sharks and the old shell-game and not to fall for the three-card Monty con.
We don't prepare our children for life by sheltering them from it. We prepare them by conveying what we have learned from our experience and trust them enough to apply that knowledge. A slight problem arises when our children know more about a particular environment than we do. This is many times the case with the new world of cyberspace. The children know more than the parents. It's the perfect recipe for hysteria.
The Poet's Eye sees that many times we can better protect our children by letting them teach us.
Teach your parents well
Their children's hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
--Graham Nash
And oh yeah, Happy Easter from Lightning Rod
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