{"id":410,"date":"2006-06-23T17:09:48","date_gmt":"2006-06-24T00:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/blog\/?p=408"},"modified":"2006-06-23T17:09:48","modified_gmt":"2006-06-24T00:09:48","slug":"myspace-and-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/2006\/06\/23\/myspace-and-accountability\/","title":{"rendered":"MySpace and Accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robin for Yahoo! Tech writes about MySpace accountability<\/a>, particularly when it comes to youth using MySpace to plan and engage in less-than-healthy activities. But how much should MySpace be accountable for what its users are doing, even when they\u2019re young?<\/p>\n

When she went to her daughter\u2019s page the headline on her last entry seared through her. It said, \u201cPriceless: Joyriding with Your Friend at 3AM\u201d. Dana says after reading her daughter\u2019s entries she realized she knew nothing about this place where her daughter could freely \u201cpromote her indulgences, had no accountability and just be cool\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can\u2019t help but feel that if kids were not using MySpace to plan their dangerous indulgences, they\u2019d be doing the same thing somewhere else. Just ten years ago, keeping your kid off the telephone was the way to keep them out of trouble, and if they made plans over the phone to go joyriding later, well, no one would have tried to make the phone company accountable for what happened. Now pretty much every teen has a cell phone and it\u2019s easier than ever to make plans and coordinate mischief without even stopping by at home to check your messages. Still, while parents may try to limit or monitor their kid\u2019s phone usage, they don\u2019t point their fingers at Cingular or Verizon or Virgin if their kid uses their phone to plan some rabble-rousing.<\/p>\n

But back to computers. If MySpace weren\u2019t an issue, you\u2019d have instant messenger services like AIM where kids could coordinate, and more and more we\u2019re going to see video-conversations propagating, which may or may not be a hit with image-conscious teens. The point is that teens are social, and they\u2019re going to talk to their friends one way or another, and what they plan to do with their friends is much more dependant on what kind of kid they are than on what medium they are using to make those plans. Sure, their may be a certain amount of peer pressure involved, a certain adrenalin and ego-boosting that go along with being able to post pictures and accounts of your exploits for all your friends to see. But MySpace isn\u2019t offering these kids the wine, it\u2019s just out there growing the grapes.<\/p>\n

So, the issue, I think, is simply that parents don\u2019t understand MySpace. And this has always been an issue in parenting: kids are always technologically two steps ahead of their parents. In the end it all comes down to active parenting, which means being involved in your kid\u2019s life and knowing what they\u2019re up to, showing an interest in their hobbies and ideas. Sure, teens don\u2019t want<\/strong> their parents to be interested in their lives, but they don\u2019t get to decide. After all, the difference between being a parent and having a kid is in how much responsibility you take in raising them.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, MySpace has made some conciliatory efforts to make their site safer for teens<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robin for Yahoo! Tech writes about MySpace accountability, particularly when it comes to youth using MySpace to plan and engage in less-than-healthy activities. But how much should MySpace be accountable for what its users are doing, even when they\u2019re young? When she went to her daughter\u2019s page the headline on her last entry seared through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}