Parents if you only knew what is on your kids myspace.com web pages you would probably have a cow! Or maybe some of you wouldn’t. My wife and I have had our experience with myspace and our youngest daughter last fall. It wasn’t that she was posting bad stuff out there, it was what her “friends” were posting. There were people I never heard of and the only way my daughter knew who they were was through her myspace.com website.

For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, let me give you the dummies version of myspace. You sign up and myspace gives you a personal webpage that you can personalize with photos, a blog (on-line journal), and then the biggie – you get to invite your friends to come to your webpage and post their photos and comments about you and your webpage. Herein lies the cool technology of myspace, but also it’s danger. Your friends are connected with their friends who are connected with their friends etc… You could wind up with someone from California or Russia in your friends list that you really do not know and that “friend” could be a internet stalker looking for his/her next victim. I am willing to wager that everyone who has been asaulted by or at least conned by an internet stalker never thought it would happen to them. Let me blunt here, there are some real wackos out there on myspace.

Let me say up front for the sake on not sounding like a prude, that I think this technology is cool and very useful. But I have gone out to some myspace pages of my daughter’s schoolmates, friends, and some kids I know who are off to college and I am very distressed and saddened by what I see. Fifteen year olds in photographs at a drinking party and the sexual language used is heart breaking. I am sure that most parents don’t know that their kids have these pages or at least do not know what is on them. I am convicted to do something, but not sure what. More than anything I want to help these kids, but how?

The concept of myspace is a very cool way to keep up with your friends and former classmates if you are into that kind of thing. The feature of forming groups that you invite people to join can be a great way to keep in touch with people you know. I know one of our female student leaders at Lake Ridge has a group for the teenage girls in our church to join so they can keep in touch.

Like it or not, we need to realize that our kids are a part of what BusinessWeek calls Generation@. They are living their lives more in cyberspace than in reality. They meet new people, converse with friends, shop, get their music, play, and even date online. According to BusinessWeek online:

Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions also hang out at other up-and-coming networks such as Facebook.com, which connects college students, and Xanga.com, an agglomeration of shared blogs. A second tier of some 300 smaller sites, such as Buzz-Oven, Classface.com, and Photobucket.com, operate under — and often inside or next to — the larger ones.

Geez, when I was a kid we either passed notes, waited until the next day, or called someone on the phone if we need to pass on information. I am an information geek, ask my wife. I love to read. Hey, I am not slamming the internet and all the cool things out there to read and enjoy, I am an information highyway junkie, (go to this link for one of the most bizarre web pages ever – http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song ). It’s not like that I am not up on technology, I am probably further ahead of the average American. I have an Ipaq Pocket PC with Bluetooth, an Apple Powerbook, a Dell Dimension desktop, wireless network, a cell phone, an Ipod, and I blog and podcast!

It just seems to me that with all of this technology like myspace, we have lost the personal touch of talking. I still question why a ten year old needs a cell phone, that is so lame for a kid that young to have one. Cell phones are for one thing and one thing only regardless of what people say, that is to talk. Maybe Dads and Moms need to spend time talking to their kids and kids need to spend some time talking to their parents. Maybe, just maybe, this family at the dinner table thing is not such a bad idea after all. It was what I brought with and what we have brought our daughters up with as well.

Please share your thoughts.