[OPLINLIST] myspace.com

[Stephen Hedges]

Myspace.com has been getting a lot of (bad) press lately, so it's not
surprising that it's being lumped together with chat as a bad thing.

We cannot hope to be as effective as the news media in shaping the
public's opinion of such wide-open, no-holds-barred Internet
communication.  We will always be dealing with irate parents who expect us
to shield their children from bad use of such technology, and I have no
easy answer for that.  Nelsonville has tried to block chat for many years,
but a lot of chat now arrives as part of "legitimate" web traffic (like
Yahoo Games).  I recently discussed this with a parent who was upset that
her daughter was using a library computer to chat through such a website,
and all I could do was promise to try to monitor what kids are doing and
stress the importance of strong parental guidance.

As librarians, however, I think it is important that we understand what is
happening here.  The Internet's primary use has always been as a
communication tool.  The "killer app" that led to widespread public use of
the Internet was e-mail; everybody wanted it.  These day, the one-to-one
Internet communication represented by e-mail is being supplemented by
one-to-a-few communication (chat) and one-to-many communication (MySpace,
Facebook, etc., and spam).  This is not a "problem" with a "solution" --
it's just the way people are using the Internet to communicate, both good
and bad.  Since we can never hope to completely control such behavior, the
old parental advice, "Don't talk to strangers," still applies.

-- 
Stephen Hedges
Nelsonville Public Library
95 W. Washington Street
Nelsonville, Ohio  45764
740-753-2118