Meridian Magazine :: Ideas & Society : The Lure of the Web

I was moved to write this article after yet another parent approached me to ask about the social interaction Internet sites frequented by their middle-schoolers and teenagers — specifically MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga. Unfortunately, in my position with a sex crime unit for a major west coast police department, my interactions with these immensely popular blogging sites have not been positive. In fact, we consider them fertile grazing ground for sexual predators, hot beds of profanity and trashing, as well as tools for bullying and intimidation.

If you are a young person who has read this far, you are no doubt rolling your eyes in disgust, having already decided that the author is yet another overreacting adult who doesn’t understand everybody is doing it. Before you panic and try to hide the article from your parents, stick with me. What you read here could have a major effect on the rest of your life.

With more than 42 million members and 14 billion page hits (visits) in November of 2005 — just on MySpace alone — the phenomenon of social web sites is clearly fun and popular. When teenagers say that everybody of a certain age (11-24) is doing it, they’re pretty close to being right.

Members of MySpace and other similar sites establish personal web sites with links to friends, music, concerts, movies, and other products and services. The main activity on the sites is blogging — the posting of pictures, personal feelings, rants, and opinions, often mixed with lies and deceptions encouraged by the anonymity of the activity.

Typically a blog (short for web log) is updated daily, and serves as a publicly accessible personal journal reflecting the personality of the blogger. Friends and other members of the site can reply to these posts, unfortunately often engaging in flame wars (inflammatory exchanges over differences of opinion), or forwarding inappropriate material not requested by the original member.

When I was first asked about these sites as a church youth leader, I responded in a manner designed to hit a middle ground of understanding between parental concern and a juvenile’s need to be in on the cutting edge of the web where parents fear to tread. Due to a number of negative professional experiences during the past year, however, I have rethought this approach and have been forced to take a much harder — if unpopular — stance.

My first concern has to do with the dishonesty inherent in so many of the member web sites and blogs. MySpace has a low-end age limit of fourteen to become a member. However, with no way of verifying a membership application, numerous eleven and twelve-year-olds have turned MySpace into a crowded middle-school playground, spawning a generation of uninhibited liars in the process.

Because of safety concerns, individuals are encouraged to lie about their personal information — in fact, they are entering an electronic environment in which they are expected to lie about who they are. There is something inherently wrong in this message.

An interrogation room in my squad room features the hand-stitched homily — “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.” This also holds true when it comes to the web page entries on MySpace and other social interaction web sites. While often lying about their name and age, bloggers post other information (pictures of their school, the locations where they work, etc.) that can make them easily identifiable.

An environment that fosters lies and deceptions does not reflect a Christ-like countenance. Instead it reflects the face of the Adversary trying to make bad habits acceptable because “everybody does it.”

Although a member’s web page on a social interaction site may be totally innocuous, there is a steady barrage of unsolicited contact from other users who are pushing Satanistic images, sexual innuendo, profane statements, and other inappropriate material. These intrusions can be ignored (one young man from our youth program described taping a piece of paper to the top portion of his computer screen while he was on MySpace so he would not see inappropriate pop-ups), but they remain a constant temptation.

Each MySpace page has a “friends” section where a user can allow other MySpace members access to his or her site. However, if a user clicks on one of the friends, he or she will be taken to that friend’s site, which has other friends registered, and so on ad infinitum. Sooner or later (usually sooner) a user will click into another user’s site that is filled with inappropriate images and messages.

As a youth, ask yourself if you would want your parents, youth leaders, or bishop to know you were interacting on these pages.

The threat of pornography, and sexual predators, are most often what we are warned about in connection with social interaction on the Internet. However, MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, and their ilk have created another even more insidious outlet for hatred and racism.

Many member blogs, especially those of middle-schoolers and teenagers, are filled with gossip, harassment, and bullying aimed at classmates. The personal distance, anonymity, and ease of the Internet seems to erase any social restraint. Profanity and trashing — the excoriating of parents, classmates, and associates — is unrelenting. Reputations are destroyed, rumors spread, and threats made, which can translate into actions, fights, and fear the next day at school.

For many youngsters blogging has become a way of life — an obsession devouring their time. Many parents fret about video games, but blogging has made the X-Box the lesser of the two evils. Coupled with the peer pressure of having to defend yourself on-line from attacks, blogging can turn into a fight for social and physical survival and result in sliding grades and a loss of normal social interaction.

Perhaps because of the intrinsic non-direct human contact built into social web sites, participants often reveal incredibly personal secrets and feelings. This is especially true of immature users who do not have a grasp of personal interaction limits. Actions, language, feelings, and thoughts a young man or woman would never dream of expressing to parents, religious leaders, counselors, and peers in face to face situations spill out like open wounds in many blogs.

With no professional or loving counselor to give feedback to this angst, individual expression can be influenced by individuals “trolling” the Internet to take advantage of the vulnerable and unwary.

The explosion of this type of Internet social interaction has had a huge impact on law enforcement. My sex crimes unit maintains several false identities on social interaction web sites and frequently clicks through members’ pages in an effort to identify predators. During 2005, my unit arrested four suspects specifically tied to making contacts with their victims through MySpace and Craigslist, another related though not completely similar site.

Routinely, we check these sites to see if we can find information about a suspect or a victim that may influence a case. Recently, we dealt with a sixteen-year-old who had been the victim of a sexual attack. An arrest was made in the case, which did not have any connection to the Internet. However, a check of the victim’s MySpace page (where she presented herself as a sexually promiscuous individual into the Goth lifestyle) gave the defense more than enough evidence to destroy the victim’s reputation.

In the past month, my unit has dealt with the arrested of a thirty-year-old man for attacking a sixteen-year-old girl who listed her after-school job on her MySpace profile; a thirty-one-year-old female teaching assistant seducing a sixteen-year-old male student via MySpace instant messaging; a mother of a fourteen-year-old who inadvertently saw her daughter’s MySpace page where there was a picture of her daughter with a gun to her head saying she wanted to kill herself after being raped (the mother had no idea; the crime turned out to be a consensual act for which the victim felt extreme guilt); and a thirteen-year-old girl who ran away and became intimate with a nineteen-year-old she met though one of her friend contacts on MySpace. Unfortunately, this list of tragedies could go on and on.

Compromises

So, what can parents and youth do? Is there a middle ground where the social interaction of the Internet can be maintained, while the danger level reduced? Perhaps — but it takes effort, patience, and compromise on everyone’s part.

The Final Solution

The final solution to the dangers of social interactions sites is not to invite them into your home/life through the Internet in the first place. Even though a compromise solution may work for families with open communication and a willingness to work with each other — easier said than done — the best resolution is simply for a youth not to establish a personal blog.

A young man in a nearby ward recently told me he closed his MySpace account three months prior to putting in his mission papers as he recognized the time he was wasting and the drag created on his spirituality.

While the collective everybody is doing it, there are many other “everybodies” involving themselves in sports, educational pursuits, Personal Progress and Duty To God programs, scouting, volunteer work, and other face-to-face social interactions — with tangible redeeming value.

During these latter days it is more important than ever to foster the positive in our lives. We need to deal with our problems in the light. Hiding behind false identities while engaging in angst-filled interactions with faceless Internet individuals can only open the door for the Adversary and invite him in.