Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Adults and MySpace

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I love this sentiment from Stephen Downes on his Half an Hour blog (which for some reason I didn’t find until today.)

I think there is no question that there is a lot of bad behaviour on the internet, and even the briefest observation shows that it is the adults, and not the kids, who are behaving badly. And in spaces such as MySpace, it does seem that the only adult presence is a negative one.

Is our best response, though, to kick the kids off MySpace? My first reaction seems to be that we are punishing the kids for the actions of the badly behaved adults.

After all, if a grown man came to a school playground and started swearing and drinking and making lewd remarks, we would react by removing the adult, not by preventing children from accessing the park.

The point is, it is up to adults to moderate the behaviour of adults. And if children are not being presented proper role models, then it is up to adults to ensure that such models are available to them. And the way to do that is not to shield them from all possible role models, because that negates the benefit of the internet. The way to do it is to be present in this space, to moderate the adults who are behaving badly, and to ourselves act as reasonable role models.

This is about so much more than MySpace that it isn’t even funny. It drives me absolutely nuts that we passively condone the horrific violence and the objectification of women (among other things) that are all around us in the media, yet when kids act stupidly in response to that we are shocked. Take 30 seconds and look at this ad. I mean really look at it. (And then spend about 30 seconds looking at this page.) And then look at it through my 8-year-old daughter’s eyes and my 6-year-old son’s eyes. And then repeat those images about 500,000 times until they get old enough to put up a MySpace site and watch what happens. Watch what happens, that is, unless I’m there constantly pointing out the motives, the lies, the misconceptions that are the fabric of those images. (My daughter now stops me before I even start with “I know Dad, I know. She’s not real…”)

The dirty little secret is that we as a society are all up in arms about MySpace not because it’s not safe but because it’s making visible the extent to which we are failing our kids.

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Comments

  1. gmlk says

    What are we teaching our children? In some twisted way, we expect children to learn the opposite of what we are teaching them.

    Children grow up in a world where presidents lie in public, getting away with it and we expect them to tell the truth? Children see sex being sold and still we expect them to remain “innocent” not thinking about such things and never act like that?

    Children see violence being glorified. War is celebrated and deemed necessary. The bloody murder of innocent bystanders is reduced to “collateral damage” as if those victims would only need repair. We define superpower by our ability to destroy, not our ability to create, maintain and protect. We’ve made revenge state policy. Television has made verbal abuse common. Why do we expect children to love peace?

  3. michael says

    if we had the choice to live in a society centered around violence(which we do) or one centered around sex, i’d choose sex every time. do we cringe when faced with questions about sex from our children because it’s easier to explain violence? i know it’s not easy to look at this subject as having just two sides, but i’d like to understand why people are much more at ease with having violent images on TV rather than sexual ones.

  4. Ken Leebow says

    Kids and adults are not doing anything different than they have done forever. However, now, instead of telling their circle of friends, they are telling the entire world.

    Kids probably need to be taught a little self-restraint and adults need to be taught that times have changed and a transparent, tell-all world exists on social networking sites.

    On these sites, secrets and privacy are a thing of the past.

    Yes Bob, Times they are a-changin.