So many people utilize this site on the Internet that it’s almost scary! For the longest time I resisted the temptation to join the crowd, but last summer I feel pray. The reason, you can’t access its information unless you’re a member (tricky huh?).
Anyway, I had my 10-year high school reunion coming up and someone had said, just post on the MySpace page: really, a MySpace page for a High School Class? Well, to my surprise, almost every high school class has a page and not only that, so did most of my old friends and many of my current ones. I had no idea!
That night I must have spent four hours or more reading up on all kinds of people from my past. Alarmingly, these people had no idea that I was even looking at their stuff (that is aside from the locked profiles that I will explain in a little bit). I found out things like who was having a baby, who had gotten divorced, and who the new spouse was! I was able to look at previous year’s high school reunion pages and follow person, after person, after person, until I had so much “good” gossip that I didn’t know what to do with myself?!?!
My pet peeve with MySpace is that you can’t access their database of people unless you’re a member, which I had no intention of ever being. The plus to having to become a member is that they do offer an option for a private profile, so that only the people you grant access to can see you’re information, but still I would rather not have any part of it. Honestly, I don’t have much of a page, but I have been amazed over and over again at the wealth of personal information that is available on any number of sites.
I’ve read things that I know for a fact to be a lie, like on my ex-boyfriend’s page, under Status, he listed single after we’d been together almost 2 years!! I also noticed that you don’t necessarily have to post the information, but if someone else does, it doesn’t take much to put two and two together. For example, I looked up an old friend of mine, whom I knew was married to another friend of mine. Her page said nothing about a husband or children, but his page totally listed her and had pictures of their family. It’s funny how something as simple as a caption to a picture, “Me and so and so at Disneyland last month,” can give you so much information, if you just take the time to read it.
Overall, I don’t like the idea of MySpace for myself or for anyone I am involved with (I don’t let my sister or my boyfriend post pictures of me or my daughter), but on the other hand, I did find it to be very useful in tracking what’s been happening with the people I know. Is it the right way to keep up on people, no I don’t think so. If they were that important to me, I should probably take the time to call them or see them (even better)!
You just never know who’s looking at your stuff on-line, whether right or wrong, with good intentions or bad, I think that you should be EXTREMELY careful with what you post and read for that matter on things like MySpace. It can be a distorted reality, which you as the poster have no control over who sees, reads, or what they do with that information afterwards. Personally, I think that if you’re going to post something on MySpace (and not make your profile private, at the very least), you might as well hang a banner on the highway for all passer-byers to see…you’d achieve the same result!
In our reading’s this week, Wood and Smith have a cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!” (pg. 62). My response to that is, they will if they spend enough time looking (like in the case of the falsely posted Status Comment or the seemingly harmless picture captions explained above). In that same chapter, page 71, they list some tips for on-line information judging: Who is the Author? What possible biases (and I will add motives) might they have? And when was it posted? These rules are great for surfing the web, and with a little modification, they can be excellent reality checks for things like MySpace.
