Pit of Doom and Uprising of the Mud Slut

    Myspace was created in 1999 by Tom Anderson and Chris Dewolfe. Up until about 2 or 3 years ago, nobody really assessed the growing threat of teenagers essentially building their own websites. Well, when I say nobody, I do mean parents. Parent's are not nobodies, so forgive me for that slip.

    Owned by a bigger company (Fox News Corp), Myspace has recently been scrutinized for it's "conspiracy" to use "image invention" (Tom Anderson's picture, though it is no longer him or Chris Dewolfe running the site, but in fact Fox News Corp and their higher conglomerate owner) to give the website a more personal feel.  Funny to know that the website we probably all (or 90% of us, anyway) belong to isn't actually owned by one or even two people, but the product of a conglomerate.

    Well, assuming most people of my generation are more media-literate than our predecessors, they might have figured as much.

    The topic of this blog, however is not concerning who owns myspace, but the hooplah surrounding it.  And the parents who want to blame all the things that happen to their kids on the website itself.

    Let's be honest here, folks.  Parents, mostly; my parents, when we got the internet, set up strict rules of conduct for internet usage.  Until we were 18, we had no rights, essentially, but it was for our own good, and I had no problem with that; until I was about 16.  Still, my parents persisted, insisting that I not post personal information online, that I not post lewd or revealing pictures on my myspace.  I obliged; especially with my father telling me this, as he was a counter-cyberterrorist intellectual.

    The fact of the matter is, parents should not blame the website.  The website is not sucking their children in to it's nasty clutches, or the nasty clutches of the so-called 'Pit of Doom', with sexual predators looming in it's depths.  They were allowed to go there, because their parents were not assessing the situation as carefully as they should have, or not caring to check on their children's activities online.

      Now, I would not dare to assume that all parents who have had something bad happen to their child because of a website were ignorant fools.  Schools, and the administration of schools need to be aware of this too.  My highschool, when I first got a myspace my Sophmore year, (which was what? 2003?) didn't have any idea that this website even existed.  After 4 years, even at the point when the website was so big that nearly everyone had one, my highschool administrators had no idea that it even existed.  It wasn't until an incident where a girl got followed home by a stranger in a car after she put her address on her public myspace that the school became aware and blocked any way of getting to the site that they were aware of this fact. Unfortunately, people are still ignorant and not facing the cause of the problem; inevitably, their own ignorance.

      What I also don't get is why kids on myspace, even after it explicitly tells them they must be 14 in order to use the site, still apply as older individuals!  Of course that's going to get you in trouble.  But besides that fact, kids that age still haven't been educated in the hazards that come with putting your information online; even when you are being careful about it.

    So read this and understand; if you're 14 and you want to have a myspace, that's fine.  Parents, make your kids privatize their myspace; this doesn't allow other users to see their profile or any of their information until they've added your child. There are even features that allow the individual who wants to access your child's myspace to have to cross a "threshold" of sorts; they have to either enter your child's last name or email address to be their "friend".  Parents should still check up on this daily if they don't want to worry about what their kids are getting into; check their comments (to avoid any lewd or incriminating dialogue, check their friends (ask them to name those friends individually or ask if they go to school or know all these people personally) and check their actual profile.  Make sure they still don't have any information up.  If worse comes to worse, mom and dad, make your own profile and insist your child add you under perjory of being grounded. Or something. 

    I'm 20.  I have no kids, but I have a niece who is eleven who begged her mother every day for a myspace until I convinced her she didn't want one because it was "only old people anyway, and they won't let you on the website unless you're at least 14."  The point is, if I can figure out some way to regulate a child's use of the internet, so can the parent.

     And don't try and play the card that you're not there all the time.  You already know that's a useless excuse and no one will buy it.  If you try to use that card, everyone's just going to point at you and say you were the parent that let the TV babysit your kid.

    Now, don't get me wrong.  I had two parents with full-time jobs; and they were divorced.  But they still found a way to negotiate with me and regulate on the things I did.

    So no offense to anyone, please, I mean no disrespect.  If you have a problem with what your kids are doing, and what is happening because of something on the internet or any other form of media, look at yourselves, first.  Then look at the school system.

    Don't blame the Mud Slut.