theirspace.com One Woman’s Frantic Efforts to do Her Duty September 2006

by Kathy Tickner
Photos by Russell Byrne

I have three sons, 12, 14, and 19. As a responsible parent I try to stay involved in my children’s lives and, therefore, I know all about myspace.com. For uninitiated readers myspace.com is an Internet “community” site that bills itself as “a place for friends.” Myspace.com is a totally free site where people – especially teenagers – can set up a profile to advertise to the world who they are, what they like and hate, their favorite music, etc. They can also set up a list of online “friends” who then can send them messages, music, videos, and pictures that show up on their page in message blocks with notes such as

do squirlls have balls?.. ben, whats your favorite color.. uhh idk yellow.. just everything – it was so much fun.

That was a transcription of an actual message. (I couldn’t possibly have made this up!)

Finally, myspace members can set up bulletins or “blogs” through which they can tell anyone who wants to read them ideas the writer has about songs, hateful people in their life, love affairs they might be having, people who are breaking their hearts…. An open-ended list of topics.

The Power of Their Space
The power of myspace.com derives from the absence of boundaries. Each space is a blank page on which the owner can write anything, post any picture or video, and then share it with the members of the vast community. And it is a vast community. At the end of July there were 45 million myspace members. If you take seven minutes to read this article, the myspace.com membership will have grown by more than 1,300 new members during your reading.

The absolute freedom with which myspace.com members conduct their transactions with each other has turned the site into an immense free-for-all. We all were teenagers ourselves, and so we can be confident that these teens aren’t always doing the things that we would approve of if we knew what they were up to.

Membership in myspace.com is nearly ubiquitous in the middle school where I teach because their individual spaces provide students with a great method of identifying themselves within their own specific sub-cultures. Their myspace pages are how teens orders their lives according to their taste in music and their other interests. In that sense, the site provides its young members with a powerful tool for creating connections with other members of their particular group. It does this by creating “friends” lists – people who they have accepted and who have accepted them into shared communities. In this way a single member might belong to dozens of these virtual villages.

Many of the groups center around music. Others around sports, movies, or perhaps a particular hero or star. Members of each subcategory can form their own little virtual world made up of companions with shared interests. The space grows even more powerful because these subgroups can be formed by any combination of factors. For example, I know of a young man who has made connections through myspace with Christians who listen to Gothic music.

The Internet is a double-edged sword. Myspace.com and similar community sites are extraordinarily powerful tools. The Internet is a hammer, someone said. It is an instrument that people can use to build something fine, or to send someone to the hospital with a crushed skull.

Internet Dangers
Myspace.com is a big, exciting, and sometimes dangerous place. It lures the kids in because especially during the middle school years they are trying to separate their identities from their parents’ influences. They can post a provocative picture of themselves, for example, and be dazzled by their own daring — and thrilled by the reactions they get. They can market themselves to their particular group by engaging in risky behaviors. This kind of behavior is actually as old as childhood itself. Little Red Riding Hood is lured off the path that her parents told her to stay on. It’s thrilling to be off that path. She’s heard of the Big Bad Wolf but can’t believe in her heart that he’s really there – or that he’s going to show up in her life.

Perverts are out there reading the things the kids write. Just last month a 14-year-old girl got into conversations in myspace with a professional model named Alexi who said she would introduce the girl to her agent and get her a modeling job. It turned out that “Alexi” was actually a 22-year-old predator named Ivan Chavez who met the girl at the appointment, abducted her, and took her to Richmond, where he raped her.

It isn’t just the perverts the big bad wolf that the kids need to worry about. Employers and college admission people will Google them and read their blogs someday. They are in danger of closing doors and opportunities to themselves because of the way they might misrepresent themselves on myspace.

Most of us parents realize the dangers and feel a nagging responsibility to try to monitor our children’s Internet interactions. It’s a problem in my own house. We have three computers.

The problem is that in trying to control our kids’ exposure on the Internet we’re trying to hit a shimmering target. If we don’t stand behind them reading over their shoulder every moment, we don’t know what our kids are doing. They are always going to stay one step ahead because the kids know more than we do about this stuff. Our 14 year-old is the one who we go to when the screen has frozen, or we can’t find some file that we just had open this morning. All that stuff is way over my head. He ends up in cyberspace somewhere participating in chats and going to websites that we are unaware of and unable to monitor. I’m sure he knows how to override the history software and get past any protection software we have in place.

I might fool myself into believing that I’m in control of the situation because I’m reading my son’s postings, for example, but I suspect that the kid has two different accounts: a sanitized one for mom and the real page where he can “get down and get dirty” in a place that only his friends – and the whole rest of the world except for his mother, I think – know about.

The worst mistake parents can make, in my opinion, is to deny children access to the Internet because of what they might do with that freedom. We want them to learn about finding their way through cyberspace. It is their culture and their birthright. They will not be able to function as members of this society unless they are familiar with this tool. So we buy equipment for them and supply them with the programs and tools so they can be literate. Then we try to watch over their shoulders to see what they do with this great resource. That seems a little false even to me.

I have good kids. These behaviors are simply part of who they are becoming in trying to have a life independent of their parents. I don’t have the answer to the problem. They’re testing the boundaries. That’s what kids do.

Our goal is to have our children become educated, savvy, and smart – but not setting themselves up for one of the disasters that happen to children using the Internet without appropriate boundaries in place.

We battle the myspace issue every day, it seems. The boys believe that I shouldn’t be horning into their space. “If I had a diary, would you read it?” they ask. However, a diary is not a public conversation. Nobody can control what happens to myspace conversations.

I try to be non-confrontational in my interventions. I’ve seen things show up in their emails or myspace accounts. “You might want to rethink what this person is saying in this profile. It doesn’t sound upfront.” Then they roll their eyes at me, of course. “O mom!”

I’m getting tired of the ongoing battles. We used to have confrontations over taking out the trash or cleaning their rooms. Now we battle over myspace.

Shelter from the Storm
Teachers are in a position to help parents combat the evil parts of the Internet. The kids spend more time with us than at home. Teachers can be good influences in teaching children to use the Web to achieve positive goals.

One thing that is below the horizon for most adults is the amount of bullying and harassing that is always taking place on the Internet. It used to be that kids could go home and escape the bullying. But now the bullies follow them right into the home. We have trouble responding to this effectively since the activity doesn’t happen on school campuses.

Students from our Excelsior Middle School have had to put up with a lot of cyberspace bullying. The school has developed a formal relationship with ANCOM, which is an acronym for ANonymousCOMmunication.

Each student receives an ID number that he/she can use to send anonymous emails to faculty members about bullying when it occurs. Other topics include such things as sexual harassment, drugs, stress about grades, family problems, abuse, and problems with friends. Students can click on whatever topic they’re concerned about and send a message to whatever faculty member they choose.

In cases where a law has been broken – such as abuse, sexual harassment, racism, and selling drugs – the faculty member can notify authorities for appropriate intervention. In other cases the selected faculty member can talk with the student and offer appropriate counseling, advice, or comfort.

ANCOM has been a terrific tool! It helps kids to feel safe. The student doesn»t have to reveal himself/herself, which is a great advantage. The kids can direct the message to anyone on the list they wish. I get about 20 of these messages a week. We get questions from students in areas involving the law, ethics, or morality and can consult other qualified staff members in order to make informed responses. The kids’ benefit from our counsel and especially from the knowledge that someone heard them; someone is listening.

I actually love the ANCOM system. We battle a lot with validation. When I get those messages I feel like I’ve earned the trust of my students. I have been the focus of online smack talk so I figure that I must be doing something right.

Offering the Other Artificial Reality
Byron is an area of high commuter activity so we are usually sending home students to sit in front of their computers rather than doing something like painting, drawing, or acting in a play. I’m helping to fix that as the art and drama teacher. Excelsior school has become noted for its drama and art programs. The programs create venues for children to learn new tasks and to develop new interests. The program offers activities that lure the kids into environments other than being alone with their computer. It is almost the only program that does so. Other after-school activities are very limited.

During the 17 years we have been doing this, we’ve been able to introduce many children to the magical world of theater. We do a play each fall and a musical every spring. Each of our productions is elaborate with scenes, costumes, and sets costing up to ten thousand dollars, not counting the sweat equity. There’s a groundswell of support for this because parents want their kids to be someplace else rather than home with a computer. This fall we’re getting ready to do Charlotte’s Web. We held auditions on the third day of school. There’s no time to waste; we get right into it.

The Impossible Dream
I always wanted to be an art teacher. I had been a competition figure skater and performer for ten years in the Ice Capades. After I finished with that I went back to college and wanted to teach art as a volunteer while going to school. I walked into Discovery Bay School in 1986 and asked if I could come in.

I began as a volunteer with the Byron public school drama program. I started with nothing, not even a classroom. The PTA set me up with a schedule for an art program and gave me a hundred dollars to begin at the Excelsior school when it was still called Byron School. I was soon working with 300 students from Byron School and Discovery Bay Elementary. I was attending classes at Mills College and would use the things I was learning in school to reinforce my Byron teaching experiences, and vice versa. I eventually earned a degree in Studio Art with a minor in Art History.

Those were interesting times! I would pull my art supplies behind me in a little red wagon. After I began teaching full time I would get a pink slip every year on March 15 because they kept cutting out art in order to balance the budget. And then each July they would rehire me because they had found some way of funding my program. I always helped them find the resources to hire me back by constantly going to the public and trying to garner support for my program.

One year, around 1991, the program was really cut for good. They told me I wouldn’t be coming back. One parent, Mike Bernacchi, set up a celebrity tennis tournament and organized some other fundraisers in order to get me hired back. It was a near thing! I loved the community and school, but if he hadn’t done that I would have had to move on.

I was constantly trying to communicate research to the parents that proved that the arts are valuable to making the child a whole person. The arts develop the quality of abstract thinking in a young child. Take that away, or teach it only once a month, and the right side of the growing brain will receive insufficient input and time-on-task to become fully developed. Kids become very left brained-oriented and the right brain hemisphere, where thinking out of the box and abstract thinking takes place, becomes atrophied. A generation of artists, inventors, and musicians are lost.

My art and theater programs provide a balm but no cure to the problem of keeping our kids safe and protected from the Internet. The most important thing is to try to pay attention to what the kids are doing. We need to get glimpses into the secret lives of our children. We must be on the lookout for warning signs. Our children need to know what the standards and boundaries are, even if they don’t always stay between the lines. If they get away from us into the wilderness, they have to know how to come back; they need to know where “back” is.

So let’s keep getting into their space. Kids and students will resent us for paying attention and prying into their affairs. It will cause us problems and aggravations, but in the long run we might save a life or at least keep it on track.°

For a great source of help on the Internet itself check out www.blogsafety.com.
The site is full of helpful advice and resources for people like us.