SIVACRACY.NET

danah: MySpace and Facebook are social network sites where individuals create profiles and link to others (“friends”) within the system. The profile serves as an individual’s digital representation (similar to homepages) of their tastes, fashion, and identity. In crafting this profile, individuals upload photos, indicate interests, list favorite musicians and describe themselves textually and through associated media. The social network feature allows participants to link themselves to others within the system, revealing their affiliations and peer group. These sites also allow friends to comment on each other’s profiles. Structurally, social network sites are a cross between a yearbook and a community website.

These sites also provide numerous communication tools. Both have a messaging system similar to email; MySpace also has a bulletin board where people can post messages that all friends can read and a blogging service where people can post entries for either friends or the public at large. When youth login, their first task is typically to check messages in order to see who has written them. While email is still used to communicate with adults and authorities, MySpace is the primary asynchronous communication tool for teens. After checking personal messages, youth check friend additions, bulletin board posts, event announcements and new blog posts by friends. They visit their friends’ pages to see new photos or check out each other’s comments. The vast majority of social network site use amongst youth does not involve surfing to strangers’ profiles, but engaging more locally with known friends and acquaintances.

MySpace has over 78 million registered accounts while Facebook has approximately 8 million. While over 85% of college students participate on Facebook if it exists on their campus, MySpace is a cultural requirement for American high school students. Or, as one teenager said, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” Not all MySpace users are teenagers, but most American teenagers have accounts on MySpace.

These sites play a key role in youth culture because they give youth a space to hang out amongst friends and peers, share cultural artifacts (like links to funny websites, comments about TV shows) and work out an image of how they see themselves. They also serve as digital publics, substituting for the types of publics that most adults took for granted growing up, but are now inaccessible for many young people – neighborhood basketball courts, malls, parks, etc. Youth are trying to map out a public youth territory for themselves, removed from adult culture. They are doing so online because their mobility and control over physical space is heavily curtailed and monitored.

Q: What is the controversy over MySpace? Is it that site in particular or as a genre of web-based-social-networks?

danah: Like previous digital publics (blogs, discussion boards, chatrooms, newsgroups), MySpace is very open – anyone can join, participate and communicate with others. While MySpace allows 14 and 15 year old users to restrict who can see their page and contact them, most users opt to make their profiles public. The primary concern is that this openness puts youth at risk, making them particularly vulnerable to predators and pedophiles.

Henry: More broadly, there are concerns about what aspects of their lives teens reveal through their online profiles. Adults are confronting images of underage drinking or sex, discussions of drug use, and signs of bullying and other abusive behavior. In some cases, teens and adults have developed different notions of privacy: young people feel more comfortable sharing aspects of their lives (for example, their sexual identities) that previous generations would have kept secret. In some cases, teens do not fully understand the risks of making certain information public. In many cases, schools are being forced to respond to real world problems which only came to their attention because this information was so publicly accessible on the web. Schools are uncertain what level of responsibility they should have over what their students do online – some are worried about what they are doing on library computers and others seek to extend their supervision into what teens are doing on their own time and off school grounds. Much of the controversy has come not as a result of anything new that MySpace and the other social software sites contribute to teen culture but simply from the fact that adults can no longer hide their eyes to aspects of youth culture in America that have been there all along. All of this is coming to head with the proposal of new federal legislation which would require all schools and libraries which receive federal funds to restrict access to these digital tools and online communities. ...