Why Youth Heart Myspace

According to the ideas of most adults, myspace is a dangerous cultural phenomenon. There is the idea that myspace causes young girls to pose naked and to destroy people's lives through gossip. Of course this seems to be an idea that is only seen with females. Others see it as a cultural phenomenon to be studied. My favorite article was Identity Production in a Networked Culture; Why Youth Heart Myspace because it sought to explain the phenomenon but not to simply condemn it. In this article, she discusses that teens live in both the digital and physical world. In the physical world teens have controlled, public and private spaces. Today, teens have less private, hanging out time, sans adults because of increases activities and restrictions. For teens, myspace is equivalent to hanging out. It is a way to create that private space. The problems come when teens mimic adult behavior. Because of age restrictions and the way it is portrayed in the media, alcohol and sex makes one an adult. These teens are simply mimicking adult behavior, which is an idea that is not new. Now, there is simply hard evidence of it.

This reminds me of Rose's essay Don't Believe the Hype because it discusses how teens try to be who they are not, ie the suburban youth acting "gangsta" or the inner city youth having expensive clothes. She claims this somehow causes a "loss of innocence." Although I am still wrapping my mind around the word "innocence," I saw much of this exposure on the myspace files I looked at. Although many of the teens were generally good kids, many tried to portray an opposite, cooler image of themselves. One really shy girl who is really involved in band had only pictures of her drunk or posing half-naked for the camera. The person she portrays in the digital world is completely different than that of the physical world. It gives her the chance to be someone that she feels she cannot be at school. Unfortunately, this can leave her open to gossip and worst, pedophiles. Also, most of her life includes going on band trips, doing homework and quietly hanging out with her friends. She lacks pictures of these more numerous moments in her life. Her profile shows her to be everything that she is not, and that may very well be the point.