The White Yoko / Internet Outage / Column: "The MySpace Social Experiment"
Best wishes to The White Yoko, who underwent a particularly nasty surgery Wednesday morning and will be laid up for several weeks.
A lightning strike at a nearby tower kept my Internet out for several days .... Those of you actually looking forward to the column I mentioned mid-last week, "The MySpace Social Experiment," can find it below.
"The MySpace Social Experiment"
In Dissent - Number Two Hundred Twenty
Friday, 14 April 2006
751 words
A Washington DC-based rapper called Asheru first brought me to MySpace; his 32-second theme song from The Boondocks cartoon show is available as a free download there. An acquaintance’s blog (which incidentally hasn’t been updated for weeks) kept me coming back. But what prompted this column was MySpace’s announcing Tuesday it has hired Microsoft’s Hemanshu Nigam to serve as its first chief security officer.
Like most people with their heads somewhere in current events, I’ve heard rumblings and warnings about MySpace and thoughtless teenagers – some television reporter (he would forgive my not jotting down his name or affiliation) recently tracked a young girl to her gym class based only on information she’d posted on her MySpace page – but a chief security officer? Is this necessary, or simply MySpace’s way of protecting itself from potential lawsuits filed by irritated (or worse, distraught) parents?
To find out, I logged onto MySpace and started clicking around. (Readers may be interested to know my profile contains a pseudonym, correct age, religious affiliation, location, sex and sexual preference, but nothing else.) The plan was to start with reasonable searches of the site’s female clientele and work backwards into unreasonable searches (i.e., underage girls), along the way cataloging examples of what seemed like risky behavior. The first search was for females with pictures attached to their profiles, aged 25 to 30, single and looking to date within 10 miles of my home. Fifty-eight results were offered.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but some attractive gals are hanging out at MySpace (that is, if their pictures can be believed), though one picture in particular stood out because it looked suspiciously like the class pictures we all posed for in school. The profile itself said she is 25, but upon scrolling to the right hand side of the page I saw she’s listed her full name, birth date and real age – 13.
Within 90 seconds I conducted two separate Internet searches, one for possible home telephone numbers and another for middle schools in her town. Each netted three viable results. How easy would it have been to call those phone numbers and ask if the girl was at home, thus allowing myself the luxury of putting an address with the correct number? Following that, how easy would it have been to get directions to that address? This was unsettling, even for someone who despises the “What if?” game.
Her “friends” list was no more reassuring. There were links to a few dozen other teen profiles, most of them girls, more than a few repeating the original mistakes and in some cases compounding them. (One 16-year-old girl posted her AOL instant messenger screen name and invited anyone who wanted to chat to approach her; Dateline and Donny Deutsch will both tell you this is how a lot of child molesters and rapists get their start.) Within 15 minutes I could have gathered similar stats on a handful of teenage girls, most older than 13 but none 18 or above. The New York Times reports MySpace has 65 million members, and you can bet that not nearly enough of them are conservative columnists doing harmless research. Start at this point and think your way forward – now you see the problem.
Hemanshe Nigam has quite the task ahead of him. Ostensibly, MySpace has asked Nigam to be the a watchdog for millions of teenagers who clearly have no watchdog at home, or else they wouldn’t be posting intimate details about themselves on the Internet. Nothing desirable about that; for every one teen who heeds MySpace’s warnings to watch themselves more carefully online, who knows how many will ignore the warnings – the teen temperament often believes it knows better – or never hear them at all.
We instinctively understand that no one my age should be viewing an underage girl’s MySpace profile, but neither MySpace nor Nigam possess the innate ability to protect teenagers from themselves or others. Block anyone over a certain age from viewing the profiles of those under a certain age and those older folks with certain motivations will simply open new accounts listing false information, thus enabling them to surf, peruse or pursue to their heart’s content. Other than by viewing each of the 65 million profiles and searching for discrepancies like the one I found, MySpace has no real recourse beyond the power of persuasion, which is equally unsettling, because if it were easy to convince teenagers to think straight, Hemanshe Nigam wouldn’t be necessary.
Like most people with their heads somewhere in current events, I’ve heard rumblings and warnings about MySpace and thoughtless teenagers – some television reporter (he would forgive my not jotting down his name or affiliation) recently tracked a young girl to her gym class based only on information she’d posted on her MySpace page – but a chief security officer? Is this necessary, or simply MySpace’s way of protecting itself from potential lawsuits filed by irritated (or worse, distraught) parents?
To find out, I logged onto MySpace and started clicking around. (Readers may be interested to know my profile contains a pseudonym, correct age, religious affiliation, location, sex and sexual preference, but nothing else.) The plan was to start with reasonable searches of the site’s female clientele and work backwards into unreasonable searches (i.e., underage girls), along the way cataloging examples of what seemed like risky behavior. The first search was for females with pictures attached to their profiles, aged 25 to 30, single and looking to date within 10 miles of my home. Fifty-eight results were offered.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but some attractive gals are hanging out at MySpace (that is, if their pictures can be believed), though one picture in particular stood out because it looked suspiciously like the class pictures we all posed for in school. The profile itself said she is 25, but upon scrolling to the right hand side of the page I saw she’s listed her full name, birth date and real age – 13.
Within 90 seconds I conducted two separate Internet searches, one for possible home telephone numbers and another for middle schools in her town. Each netted three viable results. How easy would it have been to call those phone numbers and ask if the girl was at home, thus allowing myself the luxury of putting an address with the correct number? Following that, how easy would it have been to get directions to that address? This was unsettling, even for someone who despises the “What if?” game.
Her “friends” list was no more reassuring. There were links to a few dozen other teen profiles, most of them girls, more than a few repeating the original mistakes and in some cases compounding them. (One 16-year-old girl posted her AOL instant messenger screen name and invited anyone who wanted to chat to approach her; Dateline and Donny Deutsch will both tell you this is how a lot of child molesters and rapists get their start.) Within 15 minutes I could have gathered similar stats on a handful of teenage girls, most older than 13 but none 18 or above. The New York Times reports MySpace has 65 million members, and you can bet that not nearly enough of them are conservative columnists doing harmless research. Start at this point and think your way forward – now you see the problem.
Hemanshe Nigam has quite the task ahead of him. Ostensibly, MySpace has asked Nigam to be the a watchdog for millions of teenagers who clearly have no watchdog at home, or else they wouldn’t be posting intimate details about themselves on the Internet. Nothing desirable about that; for every one teen who heeds MySpace’s warnings to watch themselves more carefully online, who knows how many will ignore the warnings – the teen temperament often believes it knows better – or never hear them at all.
We instinctively understand that no one my age should be viewing an underage girl’s MySpace profile, but neither MySpace nor Nigam possess the innate ability to protect teenagers from themselves or others. Block anyone over a certain age from viewing the profiles of those under a certain age and those older folks with certain motivations will simply open new accounts listing false information, thus enabling them to surf, peruse or pursue to their heart’s content. Other than by viewing each of the 65 million profiles and searching for discrepancies like the one I found, MySpace has no real recourse beyond the power of persuasion, which is equally unsettling, because if it were easy to convince teenagers to think straight, Hemanshe Nigam wouldn’t be necessary.
posted by Brian S. Wise | 2:13 PM
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