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MySpace

If you didn’t know MySpace, recent media coverage might lead you to think the online social network was a newly discovered circle of a dark, hot place.

In the Tribune alone in recent days, it’s been cited as a meeting ground for too-young and possibly self-mutilating devotees of “emo” (for emotional) music and, in Lake County, as a general source of teen social malaise that school administrators need to monitor for signs of student misbehavior.

“Dateline NBC,” moving on from its tireless exploration of mini-van safety flaws, did a series warning parents of the dangers of kids posting too much personal information on their MySpace pages.

And a quick glance at recent MySpace stories in other newspapers finds these headlines: “Police: MySpace user assaulted Bowie [Tex.] girl.” “Radio tuning out MySpace.” “Danger lurks in teen Web hangout.” “Man held in teen sex case.”

Taking it all in and spitting it back out as satire, “Saturday Night Live” this month portrayed an adult-education MySpace seminar. Attendees were one overeager mom wanting to communicate with her teen daughter and a dozen or so 40ish men looking for tips on seducing teenage girls.

“Let’s say you meet someone on MySpace and want to arrange to meet them in person,” asked one guy. “What’s the best way to make sure that ‘Dateline’s’ not going to be there?”

There is individual merit to all of these stories and concerns, of course. Some sexual predators do troll MySpace. Teens, not wholly grasping that the first two letters of “WWW” really do mean “world wide,” are way too free with their phone numbers and their photographs. And so on.

But collectively it’s starting to add up to something bordering on hysteria and a major public-relations problem.

As one writer said in an online forum prompted by the “SNL” sketch, “Perception is reality, folks, and the prevailing perception is social networking leads to molested kids.”

In a way this sort of backlash is inevitable. The rapid growth of MySpace — from 0 to 80 million registered users in three years — is phenomenal. In the first 20 days of May last year, the Nexis database lists 300 news stories mentioning MySpace; this year, even a 10-day window in May returns more than 1,000 stories.

Among teenagers the service — which allows them to create what used to be called personal home pages, link to one another as “friends,” etc. — is pervasive. And kids younger than the supposed, but unenforceable, minimum of 14 are routinely creating their own pages by entering a false age.

Parents who get wind of MySpace and search out their children can be genuinely shocked at the glimpse it provides into their inner lives and some of their recreational activities. In, say, the 1980s, teens who did something they didn’t want their parents to know about weren’t simultaneously trying to impress friends of friends by bragging about it: The Walkman, that era’s hot tech tool, simply didn’t work that way.

Add the digital dimension on top of it all, the feeling that this is Technology and therefore foreboding and intimidating to older generations, and you have a recipe for misunderstanding.

But misunderstanding is mostly what it is. Let’s take a deep breath here, remove our “Dateline” correspondent hats and see MySpace for what it is, not the worst-case scenario of what it can be.

It is simply a communication tool, like instant messaging, the telephone, the note passed in class. The only thing that makes it potentially dangerous is its ability to be publicly viewed, and that’s easily handled by teaching your kids to keep personal data generic and/or make their pages accessible only to approved visitors. These are covered in safety tips that MySpace blankets its pages with.

It’s not the end of the world when your teen has a MySpace page; it’s not even the end of the world if some of the views expressed thereon are a little bit shocking. Teenagers try on attitudes like outfits.

And isn’t having this window into kids’ lives better than the alternative? Parental ethics are situational, but looking at a public Web page is certainly less of an offense than opening a diary.

MySpace isn’t really as big as that 80 million number would have you believe. Drift through the site and you’ll find more untouched pages than in an 18th Century atlas. For every rock band that launched its career by building a MySpace network, there are thousands of people who made a MySpace page and then moved on.

Moreover, MySpace is due for a fall. Even more than other things on the Web, social networks seem vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles. Friendster, which was MySpace before MySpace, went from white-hot to what’s-that in a matter of months. MySpace has been booming for an ominously long time, and Wikipedia’s list of “notable social networking Web sites” is long.

Anecdotal evidence suggests teenagers are starting to spread the word about MySpace safety precautions, which is good for the kids, the site and the nervous parents. But what happens when they also spread the word that the site isn’t the hip, independent thing it began as, but rather an appendage of the Rupert Murdoch empire, like Bill O’Reilly and the Fox News Channel? And the positives of MySpace far outweigh the negatives. Really. It’s ridiculous, of course, when people compete to accumulate vast numbers of “friends.” But for those who use it to keep a genuine network together, or to keep tabs on friends they don’t get to see often, it’s a spiffy little tool. And to use it, you only have to visit the Internet rather than some scary underworld.

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sajohnson@tribune.com