Myspace Is Myspace
Filed under: Internet
This site is great! I’m browsing through thousands of pages of personal information (false or not), I can go through hundreds of pictures of people from my area wanting to add me as their online friend and I can email these girls or guys to tell them whatever I want. Sounds great right? Well not really, you see I’m almost 30 and these “online friends” are 13, 14 and 15 years old. These could be your kids and they are definitely not safe.
Myspace.com was started, in July 2003, as an online community for teenagers wanting to exchange, chat, post opinions and make new friends. At first, this sounded amazing for all those shy teenagers or prolific writers that needed a venue to write proses or blogs on everything and anything. It became a far bigger deal in July 2005 when it was bought out by Rupert Murdoch (NEWS CORP, FOX) at the surprisingly high price of $580 Million. Myspace has since been able to accumulate over 92 million users and is growing rapidly.
In the early 90’s, the internet was used sporadically and mainly for communication due to its very low transfer speed and high cost. At the turn of the millennium, high speed cable and DSL was becoming more and more available and affordable: people were changing the way they viewed the internet. The computer was now turned on even more than the television and most of the information and entertainment we got was coming from that little box attached to a mouse. It’s hard to explain the .com revolution without including words like “hotmail”, “ebay“, “amazon“, “napster”, and now “myspace” who has become the 5th most viewed website in the world and the most viewed in the US. All these incredible success stories all have a common denominator: user base. Without users to fill the pages of myspace, it would just be blank space. Without the millions and millions of emails flying around from a hotmail account to another, it would just be a nice blueish page with no content and ads. Hotmail just like myspace got started by an individual who had an idea for a site and made it happen.
Months later, even years sometimes, the site becomes popular and has “xyz” number of members. From that point on, those sites have two options: Get venture capital investment (like digg.com did recently) or sell out the name and company all together (like hotmail and myspace did). Why is a company like myspace worth $580 Million when we all know that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t give a damn about blogging and online communities, right? Easy. How much money are 92 million (and growing - 250,000 new accounts open everyday) teenagers worth? I’d guess around that figure. Just like Hotmail did years ago selling its over 8.5 million accounts to Microsoft for the lump sum of $400 Million, Murdoch, just like Gates in 1997, bought 92 million potential buyers to directly advertise to when it comes to music, movies, clothes and any sort of trend the good old NEWS CORP people can think of. Is this a good thing? Well it’s not bad because there’s no real innovation here and we’ve been accepting that kind of “commercial attack” since the days of Hanna-Barbera cartoons with their toy and cereal commercials. The only real question is why a big company like Murdoch’s would invest all that money and not protect its investment hence protect our children from dangerous predators and promiscuity? Don’t worry, this is not some right-winged propaganda, far from it - just a simple plea to the ones making the decisions: open your eyes!
Myspace.com is basically a good idea but the way it has evolved is a menace to teens and parents. Too many kids are posting too much information on their myspace profiles and putting themselves at risk to all kind of different predators. It started as a way of communicating, a place where teens or adults could post ideas, opinions and pictures to share with friends over the internet more easily. It soon escalated to more complex pages with more pictures (not necessarily shot of family and friends but most of the time self portraits and specific body shots) and more friends. A lot more friends. It’s not uncommon to see someone on myspace have over 1000 friends. Some have 20 times that number. It has quickly become a popularity contest and a cesspool of blatant self promotion.
Recently, myspace has gotten a lot for bad press for being unsafe for children and a dangerous place to post personal information. NBC went the furthest with DateLine trapping possible child molesters with a fake myspace profile and police waiting at the rendez-vous point. It is sickening to even think that a company like NEWSCORP would not try and put up ways to counter the attacks from those deviants. You don’t need a credit card to make a profile, you don’t need to verify anything whatsoever, you can enter which ever name, age and location you wish, and you can contact virtually anyone. A few weeks ago, myspace.com changed it’s “policy” and made it impossible for someone over 18 to contact minors without their full name and email address; meaning they would need to personally know them. That’s just far too little of a policy change since you can enter whatever age you want, a 47 year old predator will be able to create a profile with an age of 16 and contact whomever he wishes. Great myspace protection!
Instead of claiming to be a great tool for freedom of expression, Myspace should look within and do some self-censorship. Delete all the half naked guys and girls under the age of 18, delete all the videos of giggling girls jumping up and down their bed lip-syncing to the latest Shakira song in their underwear, delete all the explicit comments and DO NOT give the power to the user for once. Myspace is bound to be invaded by kids claiming freedom and anarchy. Am I being alarmist, I sure hope so. Is Rupert going to do something about it? Probably not as long as he can cross-promote his Fox shows with their Myspace pages. Can parents take action? YES and please do so now.
Sebastien Gomez writes for several blogs online and magazines offline.
He runs http://www.macgomez.com
Tags: dangerous, kids, myspace, network, online, pedophilia, predators, Social Networking
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