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  • ANOTHER WORRY

    Filed at 6:01 am under by dcobranchi

    I’ve banned IM from our house. It looks like I may have to block MySpace.com, too.

    Some children are so consumed by bringing people to their sites that they post racy pictures and text that goes way behind flirtatious. And people come. They flock by the hundreds. Even children whose sites are innocuous are affected. If a careful mother goes to an innocuous site and clicks on a “friend” and from the friend’s site clicks on another “friend,” she is two or three clicks away from a site with pornography — every time. No one is immune.

    During my recent myspace.com education, I saw kids from public schools, Catholic schools and home schools — all in their underwear! With every click, the stakes went up, and so did the popularity ticker. Suddenly, we are no longer talking about who has the most signatures in her yearbook and who made the cheerleading squad. We are talking about the very lives of our children — morally and physically. Sites like myspace.com have taken the innate quest for popularity and exploited it to such a degree that an entire generation is threatened.

    The entire column is worth a read.

    11 Responses to “ANOTHER WORRY”


    Comment by
    COD
    January 26th, 2006
    at 8:11 am

    So we’ve gone from Six Degress of Kevin bacon to Six Degrees of Porno? Sad…


    Comment by
    COD
    January 26th, 2006
    at 8:24 am

    Now that I’ve read the article, I think the writer is over reacting. A “friend” on Myspace is simply a link, more or less. Somebody linking to your child’s Myspace page is not even close to the same thing as picking the wrong friends in real life. The fact that a lot of insecure kids on Myspace are obsessed with building their virtual popularity is sad, but not really surprising. I would suspect the typical HEK probably pities them more than envies them.

    Further, the recommendations to turn the family computer upside down to discover if it’s been to myspace is ridiculous. There are plenty of perfectly innocent reasons to visit Myspace. For one, it’s very popular with bands. Several bands that I like have Myspace pages where they post new songs and unreleased material, and I visit there occasionally. Somehow, I have yet to be overcome with the urge to post pictures of myself in my boxers 🙂


    Comment by
    Lillian
    January 26th, 2006
    at 8:27 am

    Alex uses IM all the time — on my computer now that his wireless card is fried. He knows not to give out any identifying information, so I can’t see why IM would be a worry. He’s never had any interest in Myspace.


    Comment by
    Jennifer
    January 26th, 2006
    at 2:57 pm

    Wow. I just have a little one (so far) but often wonder what I’ll do about the internet as he gets older. Thanks for the link, that’s good to know!


    Comment by
    sam
    January 26th, 2006
    at 3:12 pm

    Wow, a mother so disengaged that she doesn’t know what her children are doing on the computer.
    As COD said, those friends are all links to people’s myspace page. I’m not really friends with Hank Williams III or with Rev. Horton Heat, but they are myspace friends of mine. I also have friends on myspace from yahoo groups, from across town, from across the country. There are even a couple of homeschool groups on myspace, sadly typical of hs groups all over the internet.
    It’s not really unlike Blogger or LiveJournal but noisier, perhaps a little “cooler.” And there’s nearly naked booty!


    Comment by
    Daryl Cobranchi
    January 26th, 2006
    at 4:03 pm

    For older teens, IM should be fine. I personally know a younger teen who got into serious trouble through IM.


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    January 26th, 2006
    at 4:19 pm

    This article couldn’t have been more timely and I’d never have seen it otherwise, so Daryl, thank you! We know a young teen here with a very racy myspace.com blog and true personal details all over it, including her zip code and local school also where she studies dance. We saw Dr. Phil dealt with a mother-daughter struggling with this same problem the other day, so I was already thinking about the sticky issues of it . . . I’ve just sent a personal letter and the link to this article, to all parents at our dance studio, without naming names. I figure if our beautiful daughters are there together some night, leaving one by one through the dark parking lot when a creep from myspace.com shows up to take his pick, my daughter’s “homeschooling” status won’t be much protection, nor any comfort for not having understood the larger risks. Again, many thanks.

    JJ


    Comment by
    Karen E
    January 26th, 2006
    at 6:13 pm

    Myspace has been the subject of much debate in our area; one friend describes it as harmless, another as a pedophile’s paradise. Some kids in our school system got into trouble for creating “spaces” for administrators and teachers, complete with pictures. When the children (who sometimes lie about their ages on myspace) use fake e-mail addresses to set up a space, it is difficult to delete.

    My husband and I have told our kids that every family has different rules, and our family has blocked myspace, not only because of the pornography and vulgarity that is too easily stumbled upon, but because if our kids have nothing better to do than look at pictures of themselves and their friends, who they see all the time anyway, we will find something more worthwhile for them to do.


    Comment by
    Jeremy Mendenhall
    January 26th, 2006
    at 6:43 pm

    As an online educator, many of my students are into other online attractions (ie. Bogs). I have to agree that when your child or student starts to show signs of “making it their life” some limits need to be put down. Because “myspace”-type sites can tend to become places with many visits from youngsters and NOT many from parents, they can quickly provide arenas for vice (ie. gossip rings among peers). Whenever one of my students gives their site out to classmates, I always like to just glance at it myself to make sure that my classroom is not ALSO aiding anything inappropriate… Routine check-ups from parents is good idea.

    Jeremy Mendenhall
    victorytutorials.com
    Online classical Christian tutorials: Great Books, Logic, Greek and More


    Comment by
    Rikki
    January 27th, 2006
    at 10:33 am

    I won’t block myspace, I like several bands that have blogs there. We’ve got rules in place that require them to notify me before they go to sites on the internet they’ve never been before. Plus, it’s not hard to keep an eye on what they are doing, both computers are side by side here in the dining room.
    My 13 year old has a blog (not at myspace). My youngest two play an online game called Runescape.They all three play on neopets and do sorta ‘chat’ on the online message boards there. So far no issues, we’ve gone over the rules of being anonymous online so many times they’ve got them memorized. ha!


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