1. Drew Miller on March 21, 2006 10:18 AM writes...

You've written a lot about the moral panic and potentially stifling legislation that might arise from it. I'm not nearly clued in enough to hear about these things from any other media. Could you summarize the threat, or point me in the direction of resources for learning about it and maybe lobbying against it?

2. zephoria on March 22, 2006 2:04 AM writes...

Do a News search for "MySpace" and you'll find tons of material on the scary predators. Watch the Dateline special. It's all over the mainstream press, from New York Times and NPR to Fox and Daily Show.

3. Billychic on March 27, 2006 12:53 AM writes...

Fabulous article.

Having personally been on MySpace when it was still relatively unknown, and having tried similar sites such as Friendster; and having found much enjoyment in the freedom of expression that MySpace has developed, I worry about the wave of tension surrounding the morality issue of sites such as MySpace.

I think your article made some very important points and raised key issues that people should be aware of - ones that will affect more than just networking and creative expression, but the future of our rights as a whole.

Thank you for your contribution.

4. Matty on March 27, 2006 7:17 AM writes...

I think alot of the moral outrage in the media stems from stories about sexual preditors on the net preying on teenagers. I think if more was done to catch these discusting people then there wouldn't be a need for such moral outrage. Not to blame the authorities only, parents need to take a greater interest what their kids are doing at home online.

5. David G on March 30, 2006 12:27 PM writes...

moral outrage aside ...

just like all of the greatest nightclubs die after 5 to 7 years, if you sell popularity, you must know that your business will not live for ever.

when restuarants open they have 2 choices; either cater to a trend and be big for 5 short years, then shut ... or, go small, basic and simple but stick around for generations.

for the first time, social business opportunities are appearing online but we have plenty of real-world analogies to explain their rise and fall - myspace chose to be a south-beach-nightclub - they will not be big 5 years from now - rather than investing further in myspace, they should start planning their next hot-spot now.

6. David G on March 30, 2006 12:32 PM writes...

PS - you're so spot-on with your LinkedIn comment ... now there is a site truly deserving of "moral outrage" - boy do we have our priorities back-assward in geekland.

Love your stuff - keep it up.

7. danek on April 6, 2006 12:15 PM writes...

By far this is the best analysis (and most thought-provoking) on the subject of social-networking I've ever read.

Thank you for the insightful summary with thoughtful opinions on this fast-evolving phenomenon of online social-networking. (it never really reached the mass until maybe 3 years ago?)

I must say that your nation-state metaphor about a social networking site is a very fascinating one to me:

"Online communities are more like nation-states than technological tools. There is a master behind the architecture, a master who controls the walls of the system and can wage war on her/his people at any point."

And your emphasis on the key differentiator between these two sites being their models of “democracy” is very convincing and interesting. The one with more participatory model encourages civil involvement to better (improve and evolve) the community, while the other with a more traditional model of setting rules for its “users” is too busy dictating what its world should look like.

This reminds me about James Surowiecki’s main argument in The Wisdom of Crowds:

“large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.”

8. Hamish MacEwan on April 15, 2006 4:20 PM writes...

Hi,

Joshua Allen made same similar observations, different enough to add to the discussion, here:

http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/Friendster++What+Went+Wrong.aspx

As for moral panics, I wonder if the concern that a single, however significant, social site, isn't a panic of its own? The "children are threatened by predators on the Net" has never been proved worse than that in "real life," but despite this, has never gone away. Its not new, its threat always been defeated and we can only continue our vigilance to ensure it doesn't succeed with all of those consequences you describe.

9. seamus on April 18, 2006 11:50 AM writes...

Excellent, cogent analysis. I was an early Friendster user, and I bailed when I recognized that the "benevolent dictatorship" was failing it by destroying the best "fakesters" that people used as non-personal connecting hubs.

I do disagree on two points:
(1) LinkedIn: Networking = brown-nosing? I don't think most people are using the site the way you think.

(2) You didn't mention Facebook, which is now a top-5 site on the Internet. While MySpace is all about freedom of identity creation (and segmenting and advertising), it does bear a risk of losing its cool cachet. But Facebook, by virtue of *only* being open to high school and college students, has the sustainable advantage of (a) perpetual youth, and (b) perpetual alumni connection. That's very powerful. If I had to bet on which social networking site will still be around in 10 years, I'd go with Facebook.

10. Kevin Farnham on April 18, 2006 10:26 PM writes...

I don't think it's as simple as "MySpace is good" and the "moral panic" is bad. There are dangers related to online activity just as there are dangers related to walking down the street. With respect to the latter, the dangers are well known, and so children are taught about them at a very young age: "don't step into the road in front of an onrushing car." And, there are safety-related regulations that apply to the sources of danger too: "cars are not allowed to drive on sidewalks."

With MySpace, the dangers have not been integrated into the society's knowledge base such that there is common sense teaching that is automatically passed from parent to child. Instead, the parents are typically ignorant. So, when they suddenly see that an unanticipated danger is present, they over-react, and try to pull the kid away from the danger. Parents clearly need to educate themselves.

Meanwhile, there also is not a set of common-sense regulations that apply to the vehicles by which the risk is conveyed. MySpace software clearly facilitates malicious actions of the small population that chooses to use it for those purposes. MySpace lets them in essence "drive on the sidewalk" in pursuit of their victims. The book my wife and I are writing about MySpace lists plenty of specific examples of this. Go to the web site above if you'd like to see some of what we've found.

My point is: the technology and the MySpace way of interacting is too new for society to have fully adjusted to it and accomodated it in a manner that lets its freedom-providing assets be enjoyed within the context of safety.

At the end of our book we have a "Petition to MySpace.com: On Safety" that suggests about a dozen ways that MySpace could make the site safer without limiting the freedom of teens to enjoy interacting with their friends. In fact, we think our suggestions would enhance the quality of enjoyment, because there would be less reason to fear predators, because the ways the current software facilitates their ability to hide would no longer be available to them.

Parents have a lot to learn. Many teens have no common sense. But societal institutions (which MySpace is, already) must also be structured such that they do not facilitate the actions of criminals, when simple changes would protect their customers by providing a safer and more secure environment.

11. Bob Jacobson on April 24, 2006 12:58 AM writes...

My fellow Corante.com blogger Danah has written a very nicely organized and argued essay on MySpace: what it means and why it matters. And why not? MySpace is the biggest thing happening on the Web -- or is it? Well, not really.

When you tote up the special-interest groups that exist online -- the quilters, geneologists, nurses, politicos, poets, historical event reenactors, fashionistas, health nuts, religionists, desert travelers, speakers of Chinese, and friends of seals, not to mention plain old hacker cells -- you find not only vast numbers in the hundreds of millions, but a cultural richness and density (what you might call, social commitment) that puts MySpace to shame. These groups have longevity, a sense of purpose, and "stickiness" (remember when stickiness was the marketers' Holy Grail?) that far exceeds the blow-up-and-blow-out "social networks." Unlike the social networks, which basically gived an undifferentiated mass the chance to spout off and maybe impress 200 other people in the universe that the spouting is significant, the much larger-in-the-aggregate special-interest groups establish internal norms that engender true community. The idiosyncracy they manifest is part and parcel of each group's identity: its raison d'etre is concrete, not an individual persona assumed and expressed because it's cool.

Danah's right: this is a phenomenon of teenage-hood, when self-identity is established by what you say and how you look -- about all that teenagers control about their lives. (I'm not talking about the teen anomalies who are ending world hunger, writing operas, reinventing their families, or reinvigorating physical neighborhoods: they're not the ones with time for online rambling. I'm talking about all the rest.)

As teens grow up and start to literally make a name for themselves in their careers, personal affairs, and communities, they'll gravitate to special-interest groups where their interests are served. That's been the case for the last 15-plus years, since the Internet went public.

Still, it's impossible to ignore MySpace, not least for the fact that its ephemeral collection of URLs has become simultaneously the roosting place for millions of teens, a press darling, Rupert Murdock's latest monopoly acquisition, and the hate object of sexually obsessed officers of the law. What a nexus! In a sense, MySpace is the ultimate proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in our youth-centric, ultra-mediated, mish-mash culture. (Interestingly, in the material world, ontogeny doesn't recapitulate phylogeny -- but we'll leave that for the ontogenists' and phylogenists' special-interest groups to debate.)

Danah's concluding paragraphs remind us that MySpace isn't all virtual fairy dust and that dangerous consequences can arise when kids fool around in hyperspace. Pedophilia isn't the new danger: as Hamish MacEwan has commented above, there's as much pedophilia in the material world as their is online. (To be more precise, Hamish, there's more pedophilia in families than online, because predator and prey are so handy to one another.) The danger is that fascist elements in law enforcement will seize on MySpace to make life more miserable for all of us, and less free.

(History repeats itself: in 1985, as a legislative policy analyst in California, I drew up a bill to endow BBSs and other early online communicators with free-speech protections. Dozens of DAs come down on me with reams of downloaded "pedophilia" -- all of which tracked back to one sad soul with a computer and a modem in Texas. The bill failed nonetheless.)

The stormtroopers of morality need to be repulsed and restrained, starting with Attorney General Gonzalez and working all the way down to the local city-college police snoop. The online world, which is safer than the other world we live in, doesn't deserve special oppression. Pedophilia's already a crime and when it occurs, it can be prosecuted, whatever it's venue.

There's something more disturbing happening here, though, and it's more subtle: the "moral outrage" generally felt that spontaneously occurs whenever three or more teenagers get together to do something that their elders or society or God doesn't condone. Hey, can't a kid have some fun? If acting out online is how teens get their groove, shouldn't they be applauded for not driving while drunk? Besides, a lot of what goes down on MySpace is creative and developmentally sound, even if it's not quite Mozart. (In a sense, bloggers and commenters differ from MySpace denizens in their song choices, only.) What is this compulsion to rein teens in a time when individuation, becoming their own persons, is so important to them now and as future citizens?

Frankly, I worry the most about Rupert. Have you watched Fox News or FX lately? Is that the future of MySpace? Teenagers, beware!

12. RIch on April 28, 2006 12:13 PM writes...

I have 5 kids and our school went through a bad time with some students myspace accounts. The FBI informed the staff that known pedophiles were targeting several of our students accounts. We all dealt with and handled the situation. In our research we discovered so many completely inappropriate sites and just plain filth. So, I created a web site http://www.theparentsedge.com to help parents deal with this. Kids are going to hate it but it will help parents that are not that tech savvy to block,monitor and learn about this phenomenon. Also, their is a lot of info available on the subject.

Hope the sites helps a little.
-Rich

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