Post #3 - Myspace

For this assignment I decided to venture back to a website that dominated my early teenage years, Myspace. The first thing that made a real impression on me was the appearance of the site and homepage. It was far different than anything I remembered, and I'm guessing it would be safe to say that most of my peers wouldn't recognize the site any better than I did. Gone is the blue-dominated page of the past, and in it's place a sleek, black and gray design with white text. From the standpoint of attractiveness, the site has definitely upgraded. It also appears that Myspace has teamed up with Hulu, the online television site, and posts shows and videos on the homepage.

As for the members that I found, I wouldn't say that the 15 profiles I looked at belonged to people who would be classified as "creepers" or "predatory", but they certainly weren't the type of characters I would want my 13-year-old son or daughter interacting with if I were a parent. Of the 15 profiles I explored, 7 of the people were extensive users of mixing uppercase and lowercase letters within words. A few of these even replaced the letter "i" with ! whenever possible. Even further disturbing was the fact that 12 of the 15 profiles either had explicit words visible on their profile in a very noticeable location or had very explicit music set to play automatically upon entering the page. This was especially shocking to me considering that all of these profiles (and 14 of 15 overall) were completely public pages with everything visible. This means that any user of the site, of any age, can easily access and be exposed to material that all would agree is not appropriate for younger audiences.