verging_on_random

MySpace Panic

It didn’t take long for American social conservatives to revert to type. It might be OK for someone running for president to set up a MySpace site but let’s get back to the main game, which is spreading moral panic. Yes folks MySpace is a tool of Satan, in which babies as young as 13 can have unprotected online contact with people they don’t know. If that possibility doesn’t make you drop everything and rush in to check what your kids are doing on the comp then you’re obviously well down the slippery slope to depravity.

Here’s the thing. According to these fundie conservatives, technology is being used to expose kids to all kinds of frightful perils.

“Perfectly good parents who have a lot of communication with their kids are having problems with this. It’s very scary. Teenagers cannot assess risk. Getting into serious trouble happens to other people and not to them,” she warned.

What kind of trouble is she talking about? Well, there’s heaps of things. Like did you know kids can put pictures of themselves and their friends on MySpace? Yep, it’s shocking I know.

One New York City mother got a chilling first-hand view of the problem after her teenage daughter’s friends posted a picture of her in a bathing suit on MySpace.com.

Fuckin’ hell!! In a bathing suit!!!! What do they think MySpace is, page 3 of a tabloid newspaper? The entertainment section of the Daily News where ‘Tiffany Jones, 15, of Tumbulgum enjoys a night out at Sizzlers with her friends Dana Roberts and Travis Amoot, both 16′. Oh wait, all those photos of kids in the media with A/S/L are only seen by hundreds of thousands of people, whereas a MySpace page, being one of a mere 156 million other MySpace pages, might be seen by as many as 2 or 3 strangers over the course of a year.

What happened to this poor girl whose pic in a bathing suit got revealed to the world, like meat left out in the sun at a Lakemba mosque? Did the cats come out to play? You betcha!

Her daughter found it funny and tried to brush off her mom’s concerns, begging her not to call the other parents, even after the post attracted responses that appeared to come from adult men.

Did a shiver of fear run down your spine when you read the bit about ‘adult men’? As opposed to child men, I guess.

But seriously, that’s where the story gets weird, in the same way that all these stories get weird (there’s about one internet moral panic scare story a week in the American media. CBS ran one last year that was truly hilarious. After all their research they found a story where a girl disappeared … and she used to log on to MySpace every day … so obviously there was a connection). Anyway getting back to bathing suit girl, what’s this shit about the post ‘attracting responses’? It was on a friend’s site, right? So what were the responses, ‘Ooh your friend in the bathing suit is hawt, can I have her digits?’ In which case I’m sure her friend used the ‘delete’ icon that’s so useful in these situations.

Or maybe bathing suit girl’s friend had info on her site that allowed these apparently-adult-men to find bathing suit girl’s MySpace, and they contacted her directly. What exactly could they do? For the benefit of those who don’t have a MySpace, they could send her a message asking to be added to her list of friends. That’s all they could do. If she refused, or just ignored the request, they couldn’t have any other contact with her. I think most kids could deal with that level of trauma.

But maybe you’re one of these parents who lies awake at night convinced that your kid is a congenital retard who runs with scissors and accepts lifts from strangers and takes lollies from old men in greasy raincoats. Like this mommy:

Lori Hahn, a computer savvy mother of three teens who keeps up with IM acronyms, said she signed on with the company after stumbling upon a chat session in which her 13-year-old son was talking with an adult male, whose picture came up in the IM window.

“We had a conversation about it. He hadn’t been aware that talking to strangers on the Internet wasn’t a fine thing to do … He was just naive,” she said.

Oh please Lori … I know who the naive one is and it sure ain’t your 13 year old son. Don’t you think kids talk about this sort of stuff all the time? While he was IMing this stranger he probably had half a dozen other convos going with friends. The clue to the mentality behind this whole moral panic is in that description of Lori as ‘computer savvy’ … because she ‘keeps up with IM acronyms’. Shit Lori, talk about cutting edge. Next thing you’ll be doing postgrad stuff about chat rooms. The perceived ‘problem’ is nothing to do with being ‘computer savvy’, it’s to do with people believing that all those monsters in the cupboard actually exist and are running wild eating children.

So many grown-ups are scared of the online world it’s hilarious. it’s a kind of primitive superstition - they fear what they don’t understand. I remember a few years back there was a front page story in the Melbourne newspapers about a web site that had pictures of boys from a Melbourne private school online. Not naked pictures or pictures of them gang banging a llama or anything … just pictures. They were taken at a rowing contest of some kind. One mum was hyperventilating all over the Herald Sun about the way she scrolled through the pics in a muck sweat, horrified that her son might be there. Her relief when she found he wasn’t! WTF was she panicking about?

Since then I’ve realised where my perceptual problem lay. I was making the mistake of thinking that kids have always been exposed to stranger danger, and that it’s actually a lot easier to deal with online than when a sinister old bloke pulls up next to you in his car, or starts talking to you on a train. I mean when I think back to my youth I can remember quite a lot of encounters with dodgy adults. Learning how to handle them is a highly desirable life skill. Tragically of course a few kids get hurt while they’re learning how to do it, just like they get hurt learning how to ride a bike or play football or cross the road or have sex. Reacting to the possibility of injury by preventing kids from doing all these things at all just means they’ll never grow up, never be able to cope with the real adult world. Only a dumb, smothering parent would react that way.

Except of course, as I now understand, that’s precisely how lots of parents react. They try to keep their kids in a protective cocoon like those poor little buggers who used to live in bubbles because their immune systems were stuffed. The kids live at home, they get driven to school by a parent, they come home the same way, all their leisure activities are undertaken with adult coaches or tutors or whatever the ballet wankers are called, every waking minute of their day is closely supervised by adults. An increasing number is even home-schooled for chrissake, because you can’t trust those public schools, you never know what risks the kids might be exposed to. I remember some parents tried to sue Epping High School not long ago because a couple of kids escaped from the stalag at lunch time. These parents’ ambition for their kids is to transform their lives into one 24/7 institution in which they can never escape the scrutiny and correction of adults.

In other words the only private space a lot of kids have where they are free from adult supervision is their room, where they can have some privacy and room to grow emotionally. The irony is that kids brought up in this over-protective climate are the ones who are least likely to know how to handle a dodgy online contact, in the unlikely event that they ever get one. And I shudder to think how socially dysfunctional they’ll be when they finally have to confront the real world. Again ironically, the advice I’d give to kids like that is to get online and meet lots of strangers! At least you’ll get a glimmering of understanding that the world’s a lot richer and more complex than the one your fucktard parents are trying to keep you in.

Unfortunately even the online world is now coming under adult supervision. There’s this:

IMSafer, a company that monitors conversations on AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace IM programs and flags dangerous, inappropriate or threatening words, IM jargon or themes and alerts parents who subscribe when it detects a potential threat.

Why stop there? Why not make kids carry a microphone so parents can pay someone to monitor their verbal convos too? I mean the world’s a scary place, let’s not leave anything to chance. Like the CEO of IMSafer says,

“It’s open season on kids”

Maybe that explains why so many Americans, despite being citizens of the most powerful nation the world has ever known (as our prime minister keeps reminding us), sit clinging to each other in the corner, teeth chattering, terrified of all those evil foreigners circling their country to do them harm. They’ve never … grown … up.