My Space Safety

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.