Added Manker: “Kids say that it’s a place to meet with their friends. But it’s like deciding to meet them in your town’s red-light district. Is that a good idea?”
Youth workers interviewed for this story agreed that the best defense against experiencing trouble with MySpace and other similar sites is parents, even though they agree that most parents don’t know their children have accounts and would be shocked to see what is being posted for the world to see. They encourage parents to discuss the dangers with their teenagers, as well as to get their own accounts and search for their kids’ and their friends’ sites. Psychologists suggest that parents ask to see their children’s sites, with 24-hour lead time to allow the kids to remove potentially problematic material.
“Most involved Christian parents don’t allow their kids to have MySpace accounts,” said Moen. “I even tell the kids in my group that I don’t think they should have these sites. But I know that most of them do, so I can’t simply ignore that.”
Lenker believes that the comfort young people feel in hiding behind a computer screen instead of having face-to-face dialogue is a reflection of a lack of communication at home.
“Face-to-face encountering is important in all aspects of life,” he said. “But many kids don’t know how to do that because they’ve never seen it in their own homes.”
Manker believes that the popularity of MySpace and other similar sites reveals a spiritual condition that has been with civilization from the beginning — that there is an aspect of
people’s lives that would be uncomfortable if Jesus were present in it.
“How would those sites be different if Jesus was on your MySpace account?” Manker said. “And that’s precisely the problem. It’s not your space. You gave up your space. It’s God’s space.”
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At one point, Jordyn Fulcher, 16, deleted her MySpace site. But she quickly put a new one together.
“I realized I was addicted to it,” she said, laughing. “I’m not really proud of that.”
Jordyn estimates that she is on MySpace two or three times a day, which can take up to a few hours. It is the preferred way of communicating for her generation, she said.
“E-mail is what my parents use, because that’s what all of their friends use,” she said. “But MySpace is more convenient for people my age.”
It’s easy, Jordyn said, to avoid getting into trouble on this popular networking site.
“Occasionally I will get messages from people I don’t know saying, ‘Hi, I’m new here, looking for cool things to do,’” she said. “But you can just block them if you don’t know
who they are, and they can’t get on your site again.”
As for the ads inviting visitors to inappropriate sites, “I just know not to go there,” she said.
Still, she understands how people can let down their guard. “I can see why people would want to write back if a message said, ‘You’re really pretty’ on your site,” she said. “MySpace can be a dangerous place if people are really stupid about it.”
The advantages of using MySpace, so far, outweigh the disadvantages, for Jordyn. “It’s better than using the phone, because I usually just want to leave messages,” she said. “It’s a way to keep in touch. It would be weird to call most people, because there’s not enough to say to have a conversation.”
It’s also the fastest way to reach her friends. “If I can’t find somebody, I know I can leave them a MySpace message and know they’ll be checking it soon,” she said.
And the downside? “It takes way too much of my time,” she said.
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Dean Nelson is the director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Sojourners, Utne Reader, Christianity Today, CCMMagazine and other national publications. His most recent book is
The Power of Serving Others (Berrett-Koehler). Before becoming a journalist and professor he served three years as a youth pastor in Detroit.
