okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

Posts Tagged ‘MySpace’

Tangled in the web of MySpace

Posted by: on: May 18, 2008


By now everyone has heard about Megan Meier, the young girl who killed herself in October when she was 13. The details of the story are rather bizzare, and bring up all sorts of discourse about how far we should go in prosecuting a 49 year old woman who, for whatever reason, thought that she could tick off Megan enough through this fake identity to leave a relationship that I guess didn’t even really exist or only on cyberspace or, yeah it’s really weird. If the girl was having a relationship with someone online that didn’t even exist in the first place, I don’t know.

I won’t even begin to understand how a 49 year old got dragged into a fight that adolescents were having anyway, particularly online. How can you intentionally manipulate someone like that online, and not even using your own profile but one someone set up for you at that? What’s worse is that I am to understand that this women actually knew the girl in real life.

People have debated this issue to death about how hypersensitive people who are depressed can be. If you’ve never been depressed or suicidal yourself you would have no clue as how you can magnify these issues. They should have left Megan alone; on the other hand, and what no one really likes to talk about, is that this shows that Megan had been depressed for quite some time, had kept it to herself, and most likely would have found any irrational excuse to kill herself. Opportunity presented itself and she took that fatal leap; some of us come back from that and some of us never get there, it’s that simple.

It’s a sick way of looking at it but again unless you’re suicidal yourself you can’t really comment on it. I’ve spoken on this issue before, particularly with the Virginia Tech situation; what is it about a society that allows so many people to fall through the cracks and so successfully enables so many people to commit suicide that it takes a tragedy like that one, or this one, to really get someone’s attention. I hate to see someone go at such a young age, I mean 13 life can change and turn itself around so quickly you wouldn’t even realize it. You haven’t experienced anything you know absolutely nothing at that age.

Nothing is going to come from this; perhaps the woman will get the full 20 years in jail hopefully she is isolated from the general population and she actually gets to see those full 20 years. We heard about this a while back and had completely forgotten about it except for now that an actual ruling has been reached. We’ll have a few far reaching laws on the books created as a result of it but then they too will be diminished because individuals that already have a problem with some of the perversion that goes on in MySpace and other social-networks will begin using those laws to their own advantage, instead of within the context that they were designed for.

Sure it’s great that there has been some justice, but it won’t have any effect on social-networking at all and certainly won’t change or educate the public about depression or suicide whatsoever. Those are the real issues at stake, because quite honestly, privacy advocates will be protecting anonymity on social-networking sites long after I’ve died of old age. There aren’t any tools that are going to protect anyone from anything as long as the lines continue to be crossed and adults continue to use the sites to do stuff they wouldn’t be able to do in real life; such as confronting the person in real life, as the woman could have, or perhaps she couldn’t because she was so close to the girls parents, yeah right.

What’s even worse is that because it is an incident between an adult and a child we’ll never really know what truly happened. The adult is always the bad one because they are supposed to be more mature and details are almost always left out when the general public gets a hold of the news. At the same time it seems to be that, more and more, adults fail to use any discretion when dealing with children anyway. That same perverse society that treats children like adults and emboldens them and gives them the authority to talk to adults any kind of way and disrespects them on the one hand, goes to extreme lengths to protect them from evil that their own parents should have been more vigilant about fighting against, on the other.

There was no MySpace for me at 13, heck I was still playing with Atari. In fact I didn’t even get to chat until I was like 20, and that was on Gopher using Telnet. But would it have made a difference, perhaps; I had the same old friends and associates and the Internet could have opened up a whole new world to me at the time. I wouldn’t be talking to schoolmates or people I saw every day either to me that seems like such a poor use of the technology but to each their own. I mean there are people across the world you can hook up with, but anyway. But we feared our parents; if we took a plane flight to Greece we just didn’t come back for fear of what our parents would do to us. That’s like, opening up the car door on the way back from the airport and falling out of the car at high speed and running away type of trouble; like you’re no longer welcome in your home anymore.

Yet times have changed, for some the Internet is a fantasy but for others it is quite real. If you don’t already know watch the tapes of that girl getting jumped and beat down that was played over and over again in the news. A reflection of how much different life has become, and how much it is still the same; technology rarely changes anything when it comes to human behavior …

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MySpace not as safe as they initially stated

Posted by: on: July 25, 2007


So MySpace was finally forthcoming and stated that the number of pedophiles using the service was a lot more than they had initially suggested, as they have removed the profiles of 29,000 offenders. While this isn’t the first time that MySpace has suggested that they are using interesting means to remove the profiles of offenders and create a safer online space for children; this gives the impression that they still are not doing enough. Even worse, it seems as they are not entirely aware of the scope of the problem either.

Unless MySpace is going to start requiring credit card verification or some other drastic, complex means of checking to see how old the children that use their service are, this is going to continue to be a huge problem. They’re in a unique position; older members are going to sites like Facebook and more sophisticated social-networking websites while children are stuck with the simplicity and easy accessibility of MySpace, so they cannot completely cut children out of the loop, not just yet anyway. You’re supposed to be at least 14 to use the service, but pretty much anyone can work around the system.

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Yeah we’re right on it; we just can’t tell you what we’re doing about it

Posted by: on: May 16, 2007


For years now activists have complained about the problems inherent with free social-networking sites which , at least on the surface, appear to be widely unregulated as they are places were anyone with a broadband connection can take advantage of rudimentary broadcasting of content from famous television shows and movies, as well as chat and network with anyone, anywhere in the world. In theory, these sites have tools which they can use to limit, or modify, who speaks with whom, and prevent children from taking to adults, or adolescents to minors, and so on and so forth. Websites such as MySpace claim to enforce their rules, or utilize the tools that they have at their disposal to prevent such actions from being taken by Internet users at home that are hiding behind the shield of anonymity, when it is absolutely necessary to do so, not as a general rule. Lately there has been news of MySpace taking more of a proactive approach; MySpace says that it is going after predators on it’s website and removing their profiles, which they should. The catch is, they refuse to inform state-attorneys as to what it is they are doing to combat the latest tool that predators use to target children. The problem is that they really do not have to either, according to the law. Anyone who has watched Dateline’s To Catch a Predator knows how serious of a problem this is; adults, typically men, seem to have irresistible compulsions to communicate with and otherwise take advantage of the innocence or naivete of children. MySpace maintains that they were the first to have created proprietary software aimed at combating this issue, and is lobbying for a federal law that requires offenders to register their email addresses to make it easier for Internet sites to screen for people. Quite honestly, that isn’t as impressive as having the ability to empower regular consumers with open-source solutions that can bring the rest of us up to speed on the technical issues surrounding this problem. The best free alternatives to regulating content I’ve seen so far are in Windows Vista, assuming that consumers can wrap their minds around manipulating user accounts to control the times that computers are accessed, what sites are accessed, and take advantage of the filtering technology that is inherent right there in the OS. Chances are MySpace in general would be blocked from being accessed, or could be, because of the randomness and general lack of ambiguity about its content in general; then again so would perfectly OK sites like YouTube.

Their approach sounds good in theory, yet it would only be effective if everyone from social-networking sites, to Internet service providers, to domain registration services, and everyone else inbetween joined forces to prevent, or alter, the types of access pedophiles would have online. Finding a creative way to do that, in which the actual rights of the offenders would not be jeopardized, and would not result in a form of technological prejudice against offenders is a big part of the challenge that having such a law passed here in the U.S. involves. MySpace needs to at least appear to be a place where children and adolescents, young adults, are safe. Whether or not that truly is the case; is something that the general public may have to determine for themselves. Is the general public wiling to give up the ease by which they can chat on sites such as MySpace anonymously, and can we as a society give up those liberties in order to protect the innocent for which more than a simple profile whereby we give our age and a few choice details are in order. Would MySpace be willing to force individuals to update their pictures on a regular basis, recheck their profiles for changes and otherwise use information other than what they or the ISP sue to identify themselves, and does this also mean that MySpace is willing to crack down on a lot of the multimedia content that is available on their site as well? The answers to these questions, at best, require a compromise between the needs of MySpace and it’s audience, yet if they can truly find a way to do so and make it a safer site for everyone, they may have accomplished a lot more at the end of the day than skeptics would have ever imagined possible.

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Let that man rest already!

Posted by: on: May 4, 2007


Candidates continue to pay homage to Ronald Reagan while Bush, predictably, is a name best left unsaid, an embarrassment best forgotten. Yet is a vote for a republican candidate a vote for Reagan, or should the Republicans find a way to redefine the party without digressing to talking about what one should do about the war? It’s ironic, because it wasn’t that long ago that the Democrats were boring, and their best arguments dealt with making attacks on Bush, which the Republications ardently defended.

This after the fact that Obama is seeking protection from the Secret Service. And bloggers should just love to post about this, Obama took over a supporters website, without compensating him and giving him the just due he took in preparing it. You know you put in your blood sweat and tears talking about the man and creating tens of thousands of “friends” on MySpace and they just give it over to Obama’s campaign because they’re interested in it. Then again, when the url is http://www.myspace.com/barackobama, lol. The guy only wanted like $50,000 for it …

A word of caution, if you are a supporter, or an enthusiast, do not use the name of the product, service, or individual, you’re supporting in the url, that sort of gives them somewhat of a legal ground to acquire whatever it is you’ve put in the hard work to build.

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a day in the life

Posted by: on: February 28, 2007


I guess I figured that it would come to this one day, though not entirely surprised that it has; you walk into the library and some kids are getting picked up by truancy officers because they’re skipping school chatting online through social-networking sites. Which should pretty much be banned because when they’re not complaining about it they’re kicking kids off of computers, or kids are hovering around, like 5 to a PC, because one is waiting for the other to finish, and so on and so forth. Hey, if you want to really make some money, you should open up a massive cyber cafe, like a 5 story building with like 300 PCs and take kids lunch money and everyone who really wants to use the computers in the public library could. You can even use Media Center Edition and rotate rap videos on the plasma out in the lobby. Sarcasm, perhaps, but is this what it has really come to, when patrons are stuck in the middle between waiting for the mob to pass, and the computer to become available?

Perhaps librarians, systems administrators, whomever, could simply block MySpace for viewing on the PCs in the library, the way that they do sites with profane and obscene material on them. It isn’t as if that material isn’t on MySpace; but that’s a slippery slope, because if they do that they have to block a lot of other free websites that have disclaimers, but aren’t really that serious about monitoring their traffic. Eventually MySpace will have some form of authentication, and hooked kids will be stealing credit cards so they can log on and talk to someone. MySpace is the way that it is, because of the quick society that we live in. MySpace kids with profiles are the latchkey children of the 80s; just that instead of the television set its downloading music, networking, and hooking up, all through one multipurpose site. But these are the same kids that were creating their own chat rooms and building their own websites anyway. Yet we complain, instead of taking it as an opportunity to learn more about technology ourselves and bring us up to speed; it could be an opportunity to connect with your kids and teach them something about life for a change. The old adage of keeping the computer in the middle of the kitchen or living room means nothing if you’re not there and your kid has a cell phone where they can text everyone anyway. These days you can chat and get in plenty of trouble without being secretive about it, if you’ve any discretion; yet we’re betting that our kids will be stupid and do dumb stuff right out in the open so we can intervene.

Social networking sites offer an invaluable service for individuals who may otherwise never get out there and make the effort to connect to society, or those who do not have the time, energy, and initiative to find people with whom they have much in common with. At the end of the day, sites like MySpace, regardless of their unintended consequences with school aged children, are simply the new places in cyberspace for individuals to “hang out”, and much of the controversy and complaints about them are similar to those people have always had when it kids congregate in the same place. When everything goes well, and everyone “plays fair” it is nice not to have to deal with the kids so much, but when the same old social dynamics that rule real-life situations come into play these sites are a nightmare; particularly for those still trying to navigate through them and learn new technologies. At the same time, in an age where there is little encouragement or motivation for kids to be in front of anything other than a television screen, a gaming console, or a computer monitor; I can’t necessarily say that I blame them either …

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MySpace sues, does anyone see the irony in this

Posted by: on: January 24, 2007


Ok so now MySpace is suing Scott Richter who allegedly didn’t learn his lesson back when Microsoft went after him last year. Of course they’re both using free platforms; social-networking sites are free, but they clean up on ad revenue, email is free, but the companies who host the services, clean up on ad revenue. Few remember that MySpace is a site we have courtesy of News Corporations’ enormous resources. Perhaps you’re sick of having Tom as a friend, but it sure beats being emailed by Scott Richter, who is spamming you, somewhere, somehow; forget MySpace, the real issue is that Richter, through whatever company he has, can stay ahead of the law. There’s more than enough revenue to go around for everyone on the net, thing is, claim yours now, before someone like Scott Richter takes it from you, or another conglomerate like the one that owns MySpace …

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Keeping what’s wrong about the Net away from who thinks that everything is right about being online …

Posted by: on: December 15, 2006


You’ve heard about Myspace Safety concerns, seen the various Dateline episodes about predators and wonder if perhaps there isn’t a better away of keeping your kid safe, while allowing them to still partake of all of the great things that the Internet has to offer. You want to know which traffic monitoring packages and age appropriate blocking software is worth getting or is more of a nuisance and hindrance than an asset. Allow Social Shield to help; their comprehensive set of services includes everything from software reviews, to book and videos that can help you keep your kids away from danger, and out of trouble. Media organizations writing about Social Network safety are encouraged to contact them as well; don’t allow our precious children to fall victim to the dangerous perils one can encounter naively attempting to navigate the Internet, allow Social Shield to help where they can using their knowledge and expertise.


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Sick of just having people listen to your music on MySpace, need to make money?

Posted by: on: November 29, 2006


This MySpace Friend Adder will not only help create buzz for your band, through the usual means, like adding friends, but also contains valuable promotion tools, such as the ability to send broadcast bulletins & event invitations and more automatically, thus exponentially increasing the likelihood that your band, and it’s great music, will be heard by the right people! You can automatically save or store account messages, accept friend requests, and speed up your blogs load time by disabling images for those with slow Internet connections automatically! All without a lot of complicated technical knowledge to do so. Track statistics and more, and take advantage of their 30 day money back guarantee.

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You’ve probably already heard Jay’s new album …

Posted by: on: November 20, 2006


Maybe I should start taking MySpace seriously; now that Jay-Z’s album has leaked out, via the popular social-networking site, Universal Music Group decided they’d go after Murdoch and company and sue to the tune of $150,000 per song, for 58 songs! Of course, irony withstanding, News Corp themselves are pulling the plug on the O.J. Simpson interview, so guess who isn’t watching the infamous celebrity theorize on what it would be like for him to commit those murders.

The real question is, however, if MySpace is a strong enough social-networking site to survive in the absence of mainstream music. Often users will digress to speaking about all of the great bands you find on the site, as though chatting and actually meeting people isn’t interesting anymore. While this gives the appearance of being a Kazaa for the new generation, not enough is said about the fact that many unsigned and independent acts are using the site as a tool to gain exposure, rather than pursuing UMG. Perhaps this is really what this lawsuit is all about …

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