Techno-Panic: "referring to the public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young"
I really liked the idea of looking at random MySpace profiles, as I can vividly remember the day I decided to create a profile as a 15 year old, simply after hearing both in the media and from my parents about what a dangerous and unsavory atmosphere the Internet brought to the children using it.
Once I had made my decision I was making a profile, I confronted my parents and, although they expressed concern over the safety of it, we sat down and addressed this moral panic head on together. By going through the site together and laying out not only the site, but its privacy settings together, I feel I successfully and safely entered the realm of the Internet and have skills to show for it. If everyone could go into it with this attitude and preparedness, I'm confident the issue of techno-panics and their moral implications would be greatly diminished.
Making it an active conversation with children would make it a much less scary place for adults and would also help children understand appropriate behaviors in a space that is (was, in the time of MySpace) still developing. (An interesting article relating to this here.)
This all said, I chose 15 profiles that people had chosen to put out publicly in order to investigate the level of information made completely public. Under the "Browse People" tab, I took the first 15 women that popped up. In retrospect with all of the new social networking sites begging people to connect and to see the Internet as an opportunity for growth and networking, it really seems like the concern over privacy and safety with people's MySpace profiles was blown out of proportion. While these women may have sought out unsafe connections on their own time, their profiles themselves give away no more information than they want to and represent things you would be able to tell by meeting them in person or looking them up in a phone book.
I guess what I'm finding is that people were probably just scared of the unknown. These are spaces of expression and would seem relatively harmless when looked at in this light.
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