How Public Is It?


To get a sense of how differently adult visitors and teen users perceive the public aspect of MySpace, picture a giant big-city train station full of peoplesay, Penn Station in Manhattan.

A person entering the station for the first time might take a sweeping look around, feel intimidated, and look for the nearest exit. A New York City commuter, on the other hand, would simply zip in and head straight for her train.

A socializing teenager entering MySpace is much like that commuter: He'll pop in and make a beeline for his friends, who are gathering in a group under the Departures sign, where they always meet. He'll check for messages, look for the latest comments or blog postings, and type his reactions and comments.

By contrast, we parents go into MySpace very new to this phenomenon, maybe searching for a child's high school or just randomly clicking profiles (Figure 2.3). Quickly overwhelmed by the vulnerability that goes with exposing oneself in such a massive public space, we might develop a sudden urge to head for the exitand insist that our kids do the same.

Figure 2.3. Thousands of MySpacers' profiles are just a click away.


But kids rarely use MySpace that way; they don't wander aimlessly, for the most part. When they've finished checking and updating their own profiles, they usually check their friends' profiles. "If they're really, really, really bored, maybe they'll start random searching," says Boyd. But teens don't search the way adults do, in a sweeping, random, out-of-the-blue fashion. Kids first search for people with shared interests, via their friends' profiles and friends lists, and then search their friends' friends lists and out through the concentric circles as time allows (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4. If there's searching at all, it starts with their friends list, ground zero for teen social networkers.


Purposeful, Not Random

That's how our 17-year-old friend Cameron (not his real name) in Nevada describes it. He uses MySpace to stay in touch with friends in his and his girlfriend's high schools, as well as to discuss national politics in a group run by "someone in DC" who keeps the conversation going and to discuss soccer in a group moderated by a soccer player in Europe.

He says those activities are all he has time for, because in addition to being a student, he's on a soccer team and works part-time for a veterinarian. He doesn't have time to customize his profile or bother with background music.

"I don't blog either. I'm not really into sharing my inner thoughts in public," says Cameron. "But I don't have any privacy tools turned on, because then people like my cousin in Texas couldn't find me."

Lisa, the MySpace user in California, is more focused on profiles and hasn't spent as much time in groups as Cameron has. She did join a MySpace group that is an online version of a real-life group she's a member of: the National Young Leaders Conference. This was pure practicality.

"All the kids in my class involved in [the conference] couldn't always coordinate their schedules to get together at the same time. So we formed a community on MySpace to keep our meeting minutes," Lisa says. Now there's no more "You must've missed the meeting!"

Multisocializing

But even though all this happens on MySpace, this is not to say that social networking is happening only there. We're seeing more and more reports around the country about teen multisocializing, which is like multitasking but encompasses a whole lot more than just socializing. Multisocializing describes how kids simultaneously juggle devices (such as PCs, phones, game players, and MP3 players), technologies (such as IM, phone texting, and MySpace), people or conversations, and tasks like homework while they are socializing.

Teenagers have many layers and shades of communication styles, depending on who's involved, and what device or site is handy.

Lisa, who uses social-networking site Facebook more now that she's heading to college, says she didn't use MySpace for discussion boards or chat. Instead, she used eSPINtheBottle.com (maybe because it's for teens only), where she'd chat with Mike in Florida. For her, different sites are for different types of communication, as well as for different types of friends.

"I've known Mike online since I was 14," she says. "I met him completely by accident when I was looking for a CliffsNotestype site. For some reason, his Web site popped up when I was on that site, so I met him in chat on it."

She's been talking to him online off and on ever since. She has "talked with him on the phone only once or twice. I have no intention of meeting him in person." When she does talk or text on the phone, she uses these types of communication for different purposes. The former are more for short, to-the-point purposes like arranging a meeting place, the latter for more sustained, multiconversation socializing.

While MySpace too is used for multisocializingsometimes for recording meeting minutes; sometimes for talking about the World Cupmost of the time, it's just used for hanging out. Even so, it is very purposeful, in the sense that teens need to do these kinds of things as they develop their own identities. None of it is as public as it looks to a parent or any other adult coming in and just browsing around.




MySpace Unraveled. A Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking from the Directors of BlogSafety. com
MySpace Unraveled: A Parents Guide to Teen Social Networking
ISBN: 032148018X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 91

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