Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

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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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Is better to keep the kids away from it or is it better to tell them about it and what to watch out for when they get into it???? I say be the parent and teach your kids what is good and bad in this world.
_________________
Mercedes Vehicles

Solid reasoning

gracias

I cant remember where I heard it, maybe at a songwriter's night in Nashville. It was called The Eye Witness News Blues"

ten four dav, but the only freedom we got after free speach is breeding. We got a lot of catch up to do. Children still having children?


Oh yeah one more thing.

happy easter back at you,

you made me happy with that picture.


and

listening to The Silver Tongue Devil and I,

All texas NPR music show. ktsx I think sunday nights, I try not to miss it

One more point about myspace coming back to bite the kids when they apply to college, just like Ragu sphetti sauce its in there, you know your permanent record

Man I can barely keep up iwth being an uncle. It must take nerves of steel to be a parent.

One of my gigs these days is teaching photography at a high school.
A couple of weeks ago I tried to get a reasonable discussion going (partly for my own education) by making a list of pros & cons for MySpace versus pros & cons for our own class web page.
On the con side for MySpace one kid said "sexual predators".
About 45 seconds later another kid put sexual predators of the pro side.
Buncha clowns.
Pain in the ass, but I love 'em. They're bright & creative, and I don't think they are all that gullible. They could spot a bogey man a mile away.
The stuff I worry a little about has more to do with the normal youthful follies that occur with or without Internet greasing, like the 15 year old girl who's screen name is "Mrs. [boyfriend name here]" because she wants to marry her 18 year old boyfriend.
And of course the most terrifying thing is still the automobile. Especially this time of year. Every Spring we lose (I would imagine) a few hundred teenagers in car wrecks.

MySpace is a mess. It's visually ugly, and the navigation is an awkward murky maze.
What it does have over our class web site, besides faddish momentum, is interactivity, community. Which is one reason I've been logging on here lately, sort of casually evaluating the possibility of putting that interactivity into our site.

Hey Wylie .. the phpbb software we use here is free. You can download it at http://phpbb.com

Jeez , I glad you said that, I thought we was going to have a bunch of kids coming here. I would got to clean up my act. You know i never used the F word in public until I went back to college in the seventies, the first time I heard a girl use it I almost dropped my matzo balls.

The was a book called The Collector, a movie too. Pretty creepy and spooky.

But I suppose I am a collector too in a way. I like to collect children's writtings. I like to watfch them change, to mature. Those two high school girls that use to post on litkicks. Now they are college women. One a sophomore one a senior, I am sure there are many more differences, but those two years interest me. A good character study from sophomore to senior. If only I had some talent for fiction.

Sorry Clay, not meant to high jack, SB got me wondering if I have been disrespectful to you. I just can't say it enough, thank you.

The Novels of John Fowles
Note: The following are synposes of John Fowles' seven novels, taken with permission from Professor James Aubrey excellent 1991 book John Fowles: A Reference Companion


http://www.fowlesbooks.com/novelsof.htm

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.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,When my teen-aged cultural consultant has her friends over to the house, they will cluster about ,,,,,,,,,

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.

My cultrual liason, step grandson Austin all of 81/2 did get grounded from the puter and playstation for a short while by his parents cause he smartmouthed at school, so I had the bright idea of telling him about "frustration," ya know, the emotional state when ya have things go differently than what ya want, and he took it in, man. Good cop, bad cop.

I'd like to see your cottontail, man. This is year #2 for your EasterBunny portrayal and I am renewed.

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.

Ohhh, horsepucky. It might work and it might not. Are you willing to take that chance with your children? Do you have children?

I'm all for the Supervision Approach. If MySpace or any other aspect of online interaction works you up that much, then monitor your child's participation in it. If you don't want to be bothered with taking the time and effort to do that, then don't cry about how horrible it is. Your child is your responsibility.

Some children get Good Sense right away. Others do not get it right away. It takes them some time to grow up. It remains the parent's responsibility to help the child interpret the world.

We discover our 2 year old child doesn't know enough not to cross a road when cars are coming, so we learn, as parents, that we must give absolute guidelines until the child internallizes what's cool and what requires caution.

Each aspect in life has its time for absolute guidance and at a certain point a child gets the idea and can be trusted to try that aspect on her/his own.

We discover our 10 year old child likes to message - cool. We keep an eye in her direction and if we see she ventures into unknown chatrooms, we sit her down and teach her the what's and the oops of strange places.

Life immitates internet and vice versa. Parents and teachers must keep kids safe by providing ways to navigate life's experiences.
We can say No to hanging out on a downtown street at 3 a.m. and we can say No to messaging a perverted lush on the net.
It's okay!

But we can also teach our kids how to sense out of bounds overtures by strangers and the basic "do not give out personal details over the net" rule.

I remember my first talk with R, then 10, who decided to hang out on his messenger as a girl. Not sure why, but to him it was trippy to see how kids (strange kids - not his friends) chatted him up.

This was a role-playing opportunity for him and a powerful chance for us to hammer in the 'no personal details' rule and the danger of provoking come-ons.

Every opportunity to teach must be seized.

jimbo, great pic. Children are the embodiment of Zen

cat, as usual you are penetrating, and my hat is off to anyone as analytical as you are who uses the term 'horsepucky.'

judih, this is why I love you. The bubble on your level is always so dead-center. I would not even think of putting my ashes on your floor.

"Parents and teachers must keep kids safe by providing ways to navigate life's experiences". I like the image and I also agree with it. Attitude is important, in education you can reach the police role easily...
Most of the kids that are my students don't have computer at home with internet conection but since four or five years ago they have access to lots of "cibers" (this is the name for little locals with more than one computer with internet conection open to the public at 1,50 pesos per hour) that appeared in all the city, downtown and also the most poor barrios. The locals use to have also telephones cabinas and a kiosco. In the barrios (where the public space almost don't exist) , they work as a place to meet other kids and sometimes to find drug/dealers. The conection don't have filtros, so the kids can click whatever they want, not matter the age they are. The parents and also the kids said that to me, I also saw something in my incursions in the barrio but I didn't do a research about it..
Last week I found in the fifth grade salon floor, after the kids left a paper with the direction www.venus.com. It made me laugh, (well, it was a first reaction and I they are not my hijos...). I wonder were they knew about it...!

thanks I feel like a fifth grader now!

the
my
space kidz
saved the day in kansas
had to go out to north carolina and

Back again.

Lightning Rod wrote:
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

Yes, today parents want society to raise their kids and if their hysteria gets the best of them they want places like my space banned. Fuck them, take the time to teach your children well and to get to know them. At the same time realize they will make mistakes and keep an eye out for them. We let our children use the computer for schoolwork and for fun but restrict their web surfing because the oldest is a thirteen year old girl just learning that her boobies have power. Know what I mean, we have to watch real close because just like me at thriteen she thinks she knows it all. So we have rules and we keep the computer they use for the internet just off the livingroom so at anytime we can check to see what's up. They are reminded at regular intervals that if someone they don't know pops up to get me or their mother immediately.

As for my space, I am a memebr and use it to find those poets that are looking for a poetic home who would fit in at DARc. I would be lying if I said I didn't get sidetracked by some of the women there but I try not too. My space can offer something for everybody even the pedofile but as parents it is our job to protect and to teach our children about this danger not my space or the innocent people who go there to interact with like minds. An excellent piece of writing my friend.
"C"

Another potential school violence situation got reported on that myplace some kid bragging about bringing it on atschool with knives. Not exactly like tattling, more like spreading th word, communication enhancement.

I never saw th dark one as being sidetracked.