And while online networking can result in potentially devastating abuses, it is the dominant computer activity of most teenagers, youth workers say.
“If I send a group e-mail announcing something, the kids won’t respond for days,” said Danny Moen, junior high pastor at Sun Grove Community Church near Sacramento, Calif. “But if I send it out through MySpace, the responses come in immediately.”
Moen set up his own MySpace account because he knew MySpace was where the young people in his group were spending their time and discussing things with each other that they would never discuss in a youth group meeting.
“It’s my missions tool,” he said. “In a weird way MySpace is where the kids are baring their souls. I have had very serious discussions with kids in the youth group about drug use, self-image, and other personal issues that they would never say face to face with me. Those conversations are priceless. The reality is that MySpace is the world they’re living in. That’s their environment.”
Youth workers who have MySpace sites use them for serious discussions and for making group announcements, but they also see them as a way to hold kids accountable for the photos the teenagers post and the things they say.
“What I see on the sites is the struggle to answer the two basic questions kids have always asked — Who am I? and Who do others want me to be?” said Keegan Lenker, youth pastor at Gateway Church of the Nazarene in Murrieta, Calif. The photos and autobiographical information reveal “a total lack of authenticity,” he said. “So I feel free to call them on it.”
Jim Manker, outreach pastor at the Sun Grove church with Moen, feels that the lack of authenticity in social networking sites is one of the activity’s biggest detriments.
“It’s a melting pot of fables, lies and temptation,” he said. “Look at the girls’ sites — they all say they’re Christian, and here are pictures of them in their thongs and showing their cleavage. It’s too easy to not be who you are, finding others who aren’t who they are.”
The popularity of the sites reveals something fundamental that is missing in our interaction with one another, Manker said.
“I think MySpace in particular is an illustration of how desperate we are for relationship and intimacy, and how terrible we are at authentic relationship,” he said. “It’s a substitute for doing the harder work of sitting across the table from one another.”
Another concern is how easy it is to migrate from MySpace to pornography sites. MySpace accounts are punctuated by pop-up ads offering explicit chat rooms and revealing photos offering porn.
“You’re really just a couple of clicks away from seeing topless girls,” said Moen. “The temptation is there in your face.”
