MySpace Musings

I am again happily staying at home and grading work from my MLS students. As always, I learn from them as I go through submissions. I am going to make a few comments and also share sites as I progress. One thing students were required to do was explore MySpace. Comments below are my musings on their findings.

• One student just shared that, in the process of looking at MySpace for an assignment, she found some pages that belonged to her own 4th & 5th grade students, who were obviously lying about their ages and also were giving out private information. So she presented a general lesson on netiquette and online safety and, without singling out students, discussed safety and privacy. She got positive feedback from both students and parents. Now here is where I want to rant...naturally due to filters she had to do this search at home. What on earth is the sense of blocking librarians, counselors, principals and other professionals from getting to any site immediately from their offices or schools? EVERY SCHOOL SHOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE FILTER OVERRIDE POWER ON CAMPUS, vested in several people. This bit about blocking access to everyone is DANGEROUS instead of enhancing safety.
• About MySpace--I am not saying that we should open it for general school use, but rather that all educators should know about it and be acquainted with its strengths and weaknesses. Not allowing educators to gain access to any website they need to see goes beyond paternalism and into the realm of insult. The assignment my students did (working from home of course) called upon them to find one inappropriate MySpace site, and one "good" site. More than anything I wanted them to explore this environment and see its possibilities rather than just have opinions based of media hype. Most of my students admit they have never even visited MySpace or FaceBook before.
  
• Here is a very good MySpace page from Florida, Ask a Librarian: http://www.myspace.com/askalibrarianfl
• Here is another great library MySpace, from Denver Public Library: http://room132.com/

Danger! Protect Our Kids!

I am thinking of a resource that is very popular today, used by people of all ages. People meet up there to catch up with each other. For most people, it is a friendly, fun place, and even a place to conduct business. They may also meet there for romantic encounters. They may end up leaving this relatively secure location and going somewhere else to have sex. Child predators are known to habituate this type of environment. Often, parents have no clue what their children are doing there. This environment professes to have rules and security measures, but admits that these are hard to enforce and that 100% safety cannot be guaranteed. And yet, these environments thrive. And parents let their kids go, in fact they enable them to go by providing them with ways to get there! What am I thinking of???

OK, another analogy from me...this time I am talking about the mall. Or maybe the movie theater. The thing is, people regularly let their kids off there and pick them up several hours later. One thing kids do at the mall is go to computer stores and open/update MySpace accounts. And at the movies, kids have been known to.....well, you figure that one out. I am not saying parents should not let kids go out in public, though sometimes I think some parents let their kids be unsupervised in malls at too early ages, and for too long. But what they need to do is teach their children to be smart and safe wherever they go. And that goes for social networking sites too. Paranoria about social networking sites is NOT the answer!

My Take on MySpace

The other day in class I said to students..."I am thinking of a technological development that can pose a threat to young people. It is something often used by child predators. It is also a place where people can get together for sex. Parents and teachers should be teaching children about the dangers of this thing I am describing. It can even be deadly! What am I describing?" They were slow to respond, probably suspecting I was trying to trick them (true, I was). Finally someone timidly offered...MySpace??? I replied "NOPE! I WAS TALKING ABOUT THE AUTOMOBILE! After all, kids have been having sex in cars for years! Cars and parking lots are often used for abductions. Far too many teens die in cars every year." My point is that MySpace is an entity that, in and of itself, is benign--just like the car. BUT people can certainly use either for nefarious purposes. So here are some comments on MySpace...

Every parent and educator should visit this community and see what it is all about. We should urge parents to teach their children safe and smart Internet use, certainly including the use of online communities like MySpace and FaceBook. As someone said the other day regarding how to find resources about online safety, two words come to mind: Nancy Willard! Do a search for her name, use her resources, and you will be well on the way to helping yourself, your colleagues, your students, and their parents.

So what about MySpace? First of all, its original intent was to provide a place for artistic types such as musicians, writers, and artists to meet, share their work, and exchange information and ideas. Of course it has grown exponentially, but this is still a very large part of what goes on at MySpace. Now you can find everything from religious groups to zoos with a healthy dose of library sites included in MySpace sites.

As part of a class assignment, I am asking students to find and describe one GOOD/constructive MySpace site, and also offer one "bad" example that is the type of site you would want to steer youngsters away from. In keeping with my pledge to do the same assignment myself, here are my "good" and "bad" sites. There are so many good ones I have trouble picking. As for the bad, I know there are lots but I do not intend to waste my time seeking out a large number.

First the BAD and a disclaimer. I am not going to post a link. I don't even suggest you do this. But I thought to myself, how can I find a really terrible site? I thought of an organization that exists for men who seek to justify their interest in child predation. I don't even want to name the organization but you can probably figure it out. I did the search and came up with some very troubling sites. I just do not want to go further in this blog with a description of what I found, but it was convincing evidence that MySpace has offensive sites.

OK, I thought, how about something more likely to turn up for a kid? I did what I suggest you do. I went to MySpace and did a school search. I searched for my own high school alma mater and for current students. I did find sites tnhat looked to me to belong to kids younger than the age limit. I also found sites where too much information was offered for the safety of the users, regardless of their ages. I found one without looking too hard that I would want to know about as a parent. The page beloned to "Sexy Kitty," who says she is 16 and posts with a lot of profanity and general silliness. She could easily be younger. She does not have security set for her page, so it is out there for all to see. This is the kind of page that is all too common, and with close reading I could no doubt track her down. I already know what she looks like and the small town school she attends. I am betting her parents have no idea that page is out there, but I found it quite easily.

NOW FOR THE GOOD:
Visiting the bad examples is not fun. It is enough to make me question the entire community. What I need now are compelling GOOD examples. They are most definitely there. Here are some constructive types of sites:

• Political sites...think of any current Presidential candidate and visit his/her site. This is an environment that cannot be ignored in an election year. Howard Dean taught a lot of people that back in the previous campaign when he spread his information via the Internet in the early stages of the campaign.
• Libraries. There are some fantastic library MySpace sites out there! Here is one: http://www.myspace.com/libraryloft I just used the first one I came to, because there are so many. This one does offer a blog entry about MySpace safety with a link to Nancy Willard's site.
• Church Youth Groups: You can find a lot of these site, but not browse them because they appropriately are secure sites for their members. Here is one: http://groups.myspace.com/Trinitypresbyterianchurch
• Musicians and artists:
• My daughter booked a coast to coast tour from her MySpace site. She is an independent singer/songwriter, specializing in Americana. Here is the link: http://www.myspace.com/emilyherring
• Don't just go to hers, though. Here is one I really like, because he is an artist as well as musician, with amazing original and creative work in both areas: http://myspace.com/grayart
• Here is a publicist who works works with a lot of musicians, including my daughter: http://myspace.com/americanmediapro
  
• OK all of those have some connection to my daughter, but there are hundreds of others out there. Try any musician or artist you have ever heard of and see what I mean! If the person does not have his/her own site, there will be a fan site.
  

In the Newspaper: MyDeathSpace

I am something of a newspaper addict. Many people now get their news online, I know, but I still like to read the old fashioned paper copy that appears on my front walk every morning. Like the crazy guy in "Heart of Darkness," I am ritualistic about how I approach my daily friend. First I scan the front section, and even read the articles that catch my eye, time permitting. Next I look at the editorial page, which is in the 2nd section. I allow myself to read the editorial cartoons, but just look at the headlines of the columns and put the section aside for later. Then I briefly glance at the local section, checking out columns there and maybe glancing the TV guide. The rest is saved for later when I continue with my orderly march through the paper. I will spare any readers that progression....All this is to say that every single day I see things in the paper related to technology that are worth exploring or discussing. Often I then mention them with students via Blackboard Discussion Board. It occurred to me to sometimes mention things gleaned from the paper in this forum as well.

Here is one: Much has been made of the way young people reacted to the Virginia Tech shootings by going to MySpace. This, to me, is one way that social networking can be beneficial. Yesterday I read in the paper about a sub-group of MySpace called MyDeathSpace. I got the feeling that this subgroup was well known, but I had never heard of it. Wikipedia explains that this site offers information about MySpace account holders who have died. I paid it a visit. While this site might sound a bit macabre, I found it to be in good taste. Not only did it offer links to MySpace users who were killed, which includes most of the students, but also to pages for other victims. I was interested in Dr. Liviu Librescu, for instance, and clicking on his picture took me to his faculty web page. Since I often pay visits to professors' web pages, seeing his somehow made him more real to me. I read about his publications, awards, and courses taught. Even though he was clearly a senior faculty member, he was pulling a full load with four classes this spring. Of course this led me to think about those classes, and how all his students must feel.

Next I moved on and visited a student's page. I was taken by the ebullient picture of Erin Peterson, just 18 and a VT freshman. Her page reflected the outgoing personality displayed in her picture. Reading her bio and the comments posted there was a touching reminder of the fragility of life. For some reason, even more moving than the tributes were the "normal everyday" comments that she probably had read shortly before her death as she and her friends communicated via MySpace.

I can certainly see how Internet places like this serve a special and valuable role in helping all of us, and especially young, technology savvy people, remember and grieve lost loved ones. If you have not paid a visit to MyDeathSpace, here is the link:

http://mydeathspace.com/