My Space

There are many people that believe MySpace is not a good thing for students to get involved in. Yes, there are some bad things about the site, but there are a lot of benefits. For example, students are more easily able to collaborate and create social networks between each other. However, some of the things that these students put on their sites are very inappropriate and can later damage their abilities to get jobs because a lot of employers now go to see if a possibly employee is on the site.

Here are some of my other ideas that I put into a brochure for one of my education classes;

Parents guide to their children’s social networking

By: Mrs. Smith

Resources:

Goodstein, Anastasia. Totally Wired. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2007

Illian, Jason. MySpace, My Kids.
Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2007.

Magid, Larry and Anne Collier. MySpace Unraveled. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 2007.

Advantages
Teens can participate in interest groups such as: politics, music, sports, and many other groups
Teens customize their pages and feel that the page belongs to them
Teens can easily socialize with other students from their school
Teens can easily socialize with other teens on their buddy list from anywhere
Teens hopefully will learn risk assessment, which is considered to be the primary tasks of adolescent development
Teens have MySpace email, buddy list, address book, MySpace events, instant messaging, blogging
Disadvantages
Teens are more easily able to continue negative and or destructive behavior
Teens can learn from others in these interests groups to help them continue their destructive behavior secretly
Teens blogs and social networking spaces online can create a new image of themselves that they fear to have in public
Hard to control
Teens can get around filters by using phones, PDAs, laptops, hand held game players to go online

Pros
- Allows teens to connect with friends
- Allows for social development
- Blogging is more interactive
- MySpace pages show visual self-expression
_ Creating and experimenting with their identity
- Allows for multi-socializing

Cons
- Teens can be using the chat rooms too much and get out of touch with family life
- Pages are not truly a private space
- Posted writings and comments can be copied, shared, and passed around
- Allows profanity, sexual content to be shared



Legitimate Concerns
- Parents concerns about destructive behaviors being reinforced by other teens
- Cyberbullying causing low self-esteem
- Sexual predators

Speculative Concerns
- Fear that teens are being overexposed due to socializing on the net
- “Dateline NBC” (spring 2006) sexual predators shows on continently; other media joining in with the trend

What are MySpace and other social networking?
* Place where teens can express themselves in many different ways
* Create blogs which are easy to set up with photos, favorite web sites, journaling
* Blogging has become more interactive, creating casual communications and socializing between teens
* MySpace is used for many different things such as: commenting on friends’ profiles, get comments on their profile, rankings on photos and buddy lists
* Create a diary to show teens feelings
* Meet people that they have common interests in the different communities
* Social networking is happening everywhere! Sweden, Korea, Portugal, China, etc.
“What parents are seeing, in effect, is what adolescents have been doing and saying for eons in more private spaces . . .” (Magid and Collier 7)


What can parents do?
- Ask your children for their MySpace password and once in a while check out their profile and blogs
- Trust your children to behave properly online by allowing them to participate in MySpace
- Enforce punishments when there is inappropriate behavior that parents learn about or see
- Be honest and share your concerns with your children
- Be patient with your children
- Do not be too authoritative, yet not too lenient
- Most important thing is to have open communication with your children; do not let your children dissolve into the online world