MySpace
From LIS 460 Summer 2007
Contents |
What is MySpace?
"MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends."
MySpace is a place online that allows its users to create a profile that is personal to them. Users can add pictures, blog, decorate their page, and list their interests. Users can add friends and form their own community. MySpace claims that their site is for everyone listing matchmaking, people looking to keep in contact with friend, family, and long lost people, and business people interested in networking as potential users.
How do you use MySpace?
- First you sign up or 'join' the site...its free.
- Next decorate your profile
* Add information about yourself you want to share with friends and viewers
* Upload pics and video
* Add links from other sites you already contribute to (blog, pictures, ect.)
* Begin a blog on your page
* And of course add color, graphics, and sound to make your site visually unique
- Now invite friends to join MySpace as well or search on MySpace for friends who are already users of the site
MySpace Controversy
Just looking at the MySpace FAQ page would be enough to warn a user that MySpace has some issues. Some of the FAQ's include: "Someone is pretending to be my band, what do I do?", " Someone is using my email address without my permission - what can I do?", "How do we remove an imposter profile for a teacher/faculty member?", and the twenty links devoted to reporting and dealing with abuse on MySpace.
Scams are a huge problem for the site. One of the reasons MySpace is so popular is because it is an easy site to use, four steps and you have a personalized site. This is also one of the reasons it is so open to people out to scam others. "Programmers are writing scripts that take advantage of specific features on MySpace, including "friend request," where one user asks to be added to another user's list of buddies." [Insurance Journal 12/27/06] What this means is that users could respond to a request from someone they believe is their 'friend' and really be accepting anything from simple spam or junk email to something more serious like identity theft.
Another worry for users is the possibility of sexual predators on MySpace. Since the beginning of screen names people have been creating alternate identities for themselves. Many parents are unaware of what their children list in their profiles, what identity they are sending out into this online community. Not that all teen users are sending out explicit photos and information, many of them just aren't careful with the information they put out there. ""So many people don't even use common sense," says Katie Pirtle, a high school student. "Some people even put their phone number on there." " [CBS Evening News 2/6/06] While MySpace does require its users to be age 14 or older and not to display personally identifying material CBS found that teens routinely ignore these rules. Teens are not considering that it is not only their friends who are viewing this material, that it could be a sexual predator.
Tips to Keep You Safe
- Avoid putting up information that a stranger could use to find you
- Be careful when adding friends to your site...be sure you know them
- Avoid meeting someone you've met through the site
- Be careful about what photos you post on your site...think hard about putting up photos that are sexually suggestive, locate you, or make you look bad (think future employers)
- Don't lie about your age
MySpace in the School Library
Ok, so after all the scary controversies surrounding MySpace your library could still have a MySpace page. A part of you may really want to run in the other direction and refuse to allow anyone 18 and under to even use the site but bear with me...
- Many students are already using MySpace so they are familiar with the technology...so having a page on the library listing fun activities and new books could be a fun way for the students to discover things in the library.
- Or, as the techno savvy librarian that you are you could hold MySpace workshops. Students use html code to decorate their pages. You could teach students high tech ways to adorn their pages while giving them good information on what is and is not safe to put on their pages. You could share articles and stories about teens who have run into trouble on the site, and showcase cool, but safe pages that are out there.
- Finally you could give a seminar for parents. Teach them how to use MySpace. Give the parents information about why their children love the site and how to keep them safe on it.
- Students could use the MySpace format in the classroom to create a page on an author, scientist, or famous historian (depending on the subject) as a fresh way to do reports on people. This could also be done for characters in books as well. I wouldn't endorse actually creating a MySpace page because in my reading about what goes wrong in MySpace there are a lot of legal complaints and issues that come into play when people attempt to create pages for people that they are not. Little known literary characters may not cause too much trouble but a name like Holden Caulfield may cause a few problems. Also becoming an actual person on MySpace (George Washington to George Bush) is going to really make problems that the librarian or teacher is not going to want to deal with.
Sources
[MySpace]
