Fred has interrupted his usual posting on the VC world and the music he happens to be listening to in order to take a look at the debate about MySpace. The parallels he draws to the many other things that have terrified parents over the years are certainly relevant and quotes Chartreuse's post in which she compares the freedom (and risk) of MySpace to that which our generation enjoyed when we stopped riding our bike around the driveway and took it out on the open road.
I suppose the one difference is that the effects of the bike (or of growing your hair long or of listening to Elvis or the Beatles) is transitory - assuming something truly horrible doesn't happen (and such things are mercifully rare), our youthful indiscretions can remain a part of our past. Just ask George W Bush...
On MySpace, though, services like Feedster go out and index the world's content and, if things go according to plan, they keep that data (and make it searchable) forever, even if the source page has long since gone away or changed. Meaning that our youthful musings and indiscretions will be there for the world to see years or even decades later. I'd be mortified if people read some of the things I might have written five or ten years ago, let alone when I was an adolescent.
We may wind up with an entire generation who can't possibly run for political office, since the future press and blogosphere will be able to drag up all kinds of muck from the past to embarrass them. We'll be left with only the candidates whose parents wouldn't let them explore the online social world when they were kids.
Unless, of course, part of the new ways of communicating and expressing themselves will lead to a generation better able than ours to communicate, using the new tools and social mores and conventions and language and rules of engagement that evolve from these online social communities.
Sounds farfetched? Not to me. I personally believe that my generation's reliance on telephone and television and other verbal and visual means of communication is one of the reasons so many in this country remain clueless about what is really going on in the world. The renaissance of written communication, even one dominated by the sort of slang we see on MySpace, means that kids are learning to take the time to compose and consider what they say before posting it, and others are reading and interpreting these more considered thoughts. They get exposure to the thoughts and ideas of people across town or across the world who happen to gravitate to the same online community through a common interest - people, and points of view, they would never get from watching TV or hanging out with their clique of friends.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids to be denied the experience of participating in these communities just because something bad might happen. As with everything in life, our job as parents is to teach values and try to instill common sense and the understanding that actions and words have consequences...and then do our best to stay out of the way and lead by example.
Like it or not, these skills will be as important as other "computer skills" that had to be taught to previous generations, like "mousing" and "keyboarding" and "using hyperlinks" and other things my kids were doing before they had hit kindergarten. Sure, they'll have to deal with people who post inappropriate things, or send nasty emails, or make fun of them, just as we had to deal with the schoolyard bully or learn to do the right thing in an environment where racial or social stereotypes flourished. Better they learn that now than graduate into the world unprepared to deal with it.
Asking our kids to wait to experience them until they are "old enough" would be to deny them a critical part of the education they will need to function in society as it evolves. Worse, it robs us of the ability to work with our kids - parent them - as they are taking their first steps in an online world where they generate, and don't just consume, content, and where their words and actions have consequences they can't yet understand.
And that is scarier, and more dangerous, than any possibility that they might read or see something "inappropriate". Our job as parents is not to pretend that bad things don't exist and to shield our kids from the outside world. Our job is to prepare and teach our children to survive and thrive in the world they'll be living in when we're no longer there to protect them.
Those who look closely at their feedreaders may have noticed a new name under "posted by" on GigaOm
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