Parental Advisory?
By Neil Dodds
27 February, 2006
Fake sites insulting schoolteachers. Swearing and sexy photos. Dodgy adults making overtures to teenage girls. Several real-life sexual assault cases: Teen and twentysomething community site MySpace is facing a media backlash.
Wired has the full story on how "the world's fastest growing website ever" has puzzled and appalled the adult world in equal measure. It reports on how a number of adults have been accused of using MySpace to prey on underage girls - and how in some cases, teenagers have been sexually assaulted and their attackers jailed.
MySpace even gets blame for hosting schoolboy pranks, like the 17 year old who was suspended from normal classes after creating a MySpace page ridiculing his headmaster. Another pupil posted a cartoon of her teacher's decapitated head, and requested $20 from her friends "to pay for a hitman."
Wired explains that the site - with a community of around 57 million people - is actually a lot safer than real-world environments (indeed, MySpace's record of sexual assault compares favourably with the state of California's). The recent press outrage, it argues, is probably due more to adults lack of understanding of MySpace values and aesthetics.
It's true that MySpace's enormous success has occured under the radar of most adults. 57 million people - that's around the size of Britain or France. A reported 870 percent year on year growth. If MySpace was something like Hotmail or Ebay or Google, that adults understood and used every day, it would have been a household name ages ago: Instead, it has become the internet's greatest ever "stealth success."
Your correspondent, who has used the internet daily for six or seven years, had never heard of it before Rupert Murdoch paid over half a billion dollars for the MySpace site and community.
I suspect that my experience is true of most adults, even more so for those with teenage children. In fact, much of what makes MySpace attractive to youngsters seems designed to repel adults: Hideous layouts, terrible teen music, some sexy photos, barely-literal text-message style notes from cretinous "internet friends" pinned around the page... one commentator has compared the mess to a "teenager's bedroom" - adults can't understand it and they're not meant to.
It's unlikely much can be done to prevent kids accessing MySpace - after all, teens can get around most blockers adults devise. And it may be true that parents prefer their kids playing with online friends (many of whom, after all, are real schoolmates) than hanging around the streets.
But could MySpace end up with Parental Advisory warnings, like the rappers and death metal bands of the 1990s? It might not do them any harm. Rappers wore "Parental Advisory" stickers as a badge of honour: Some stars even wore t-shirts with the slogan. A ban on Marilyn Manson t-shirts after the Columbine shootings didn't harm the goth-horror star's career. More recently, reports of explicit and violent scenes in video games have sent sales of the offending games through the roof.
A little notoriety can be a great boost for a business' credibility among teens. Just think, after Murdoch's purchase, some commentators suggested that youngsters might decide MySpace had become too corporate and move somewhere else. The present hysteria could make the community grow even faster.
|
 Printer friendly version
 Email this article to a friend
Related articles:
|
