I watched Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp.’s acquisition ($580 million) this fall of MySpace.com,
the dominant teen-oriented personal webpage site (42 million users),
with professional interest. It was a smart move for a traditional media
company to make, in my view.
But lately I’ve been watching MySpace for a more personal reason. My
teen-age daughter maintains a page (as do nearly all of her friends, it
seems; the service is free for them), putting up photos and text,
soliciting comments from her friends and commenting on their pages,
listing favorite music and celebrities, chatting with her friends, etc.
Now, for the most part she’s been reasonable with the content added —
though in a couple instances her mother or I have mandated edits to her
page. Apparently, some of her friends are posting to MySpace
unsupervised; I suspect that their parents are clueless to the kids’
MySpace activities. Perusing the MySpace pages of her circle of friends
and fellow students, I’ve spotted plenty of profanity, suggestive sexy
photographs (though none pornographic), and overall teen tastelessness. One male fellow student filled
his page with photos of near-nude women and expressed his desire to
participate in an orgy. (That kid is never dating my daughter!)
MySpace is fairly loose with what it will allow, obviously. The terms
of agreement that users must sign prohibits nudity, violence, and
offensive subject matter. But that leaves plenty of room for teens to
post stuff to their pages that will concern parents and educators but titillate their peers.
I point this out not as a warning to parents (well, they should be
paying attention), but to point out what a different world traditional
media companies like News Corp. enter when they get into the social
networking space. I hope more media companies move similarly. But it
will take a new set of skills and ethical standards to operate here. This isn’t your father’s media.
