Web site stirs schools, parents, students

MySpace.com draws ire, teen devotion, crackdowns

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Charlie Shoemaker⁄The Gazette ‘‘I trust my kids that they’re not going to put anything on (the Web) their grandmother wouldn’t approve of,” says Deanna Duff, the mother of Brittany, a Gaithersburg High School sophomore. Click here to enlarge this photo Charlie Shoemaker⁄The Gazette Deanna Duff, the mother of Brittany, a Gaithersburg High School sophomore, says parents need to know what their children are viewing on the Internet.

But for a while there, it seemed like everyone was on MySpace in computer labs during class, says Gaithersburg High School sophomore Brittany Duff, browsing through classmates’ profiles, posting photos, just generally mongering gossip and teenage folly — school administrators for months without the slightest notion of what was going on.

‘‘No idea,” the 15-year-old said recently, shaking her head as she smiled at the ceiling of her Montgomery Village home. ‘‘No idea.”

MySpace was not on the county’s list of blocked sites at the beginning of the year but was by the holidays because of its ‘‘pornographic” content, said schools’ spokesman Brian Edwards.

The county’s reasoning echoes a growing cry from school systems across the country scrambling to respond.

No one argues against barring MySpace from school computers during school hours. Where nerves get frayed is in the lengths to which some school systems are going to punish students for what they put on their profiles — suspending and expelling students, some even barring students from having a MySpace profile at all.

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It has blurred the line marking how far a school should reach into a student’s life, says Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, and constitutes no less than a ‘‘giant leap in a school’s ability to control a student’s expression outside of school.”

‘‘It’s important that schools recognize the dividing line. I don’t really see this as being a significant difference from the school going to the local library and seeing what books they check out,” he said.

Though Gaithersburg, Quince Orchard and Watkins Mill high schools have yet to suspend or expel students for MySpace, the school system suggested that computer administrators at each school go onto MySpace to see what students have on their profiles, says Paul Dance, Watkins Mill’s user support specialist. He says he has not done so.

And despite county schools’ best efforts in filtering out MySpace, Dance says, it has by no means kept the more tech-savvy students from finding ways around the blocks.

Shared space Despite the much-discussed rift between parents and teens when it comes to the Internet, the two share a telling common ground, according to a study last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project: *81 percent of parents with Internet-active teens say their children are not careful enough about revealing information about themselves online — 79 percent of those teens agree. *65 percent of all parents think that teens do things online they would not want their parents to know about — 64 percent of teens in the study said their parents were right.

‘‘We have really had to curtail access to the computer,” says Quince Orchard principal Daniel Shea. ‘‘It’s too bad that something that’s supposed to be used for information and discourse turns into being something destructive.”

Launched more than two years ago, MySpace’s no-cost, all-in-one model is nothing new.

Answer questions about music, movies and books. Post photos. Connect your profile to your friends’. Sound off on the blog feature — shorthand for Web log, like an online diary.

What separates MySpace is that a few clicks of the mouse links its members up to the intimate, if not explicit, lives of 61 million MySpace users.

One hundred ninety-two of them are friends linked directly to the profile of Gaithersburg high sophomore Kelly Holleran.

The 16-year-old scores a resounding understatement when she describes how MySpace has become more than a fad.

‘‘MySpace is almost like a virtual popularity contest, almost to see how elite you can be... to see how many comments you can get, who can post the funniest pictures, the sexiest pictures,” she says.

Which, she adds, can get more than racy.

‘‘It can be really gross. There’ll be pictures of kids standing around kegs, doing drugs or smoking pot... girls dress in their bra and take pictures... They may as well be in Playboy.”

By exercising a little common sense, Holleran and Duff have learned to navigate their way around fears of sexual harassment and online predators. One, don’t accept messages from strangers. Two, don’t post too-personal information — these days, Duff’s profile says she lives in Canada.

But not all teens, they said, are as conscious of the dangers as they could be.

‘‘I don’t think they’re that aware at all. They don’t care; they figure it won’t happen to them,” Duff says.

Anita Stonebraker warns as many fellow parents in the Gaithersburg Parent Teacher Student Association about MySpace as she can. The problem is that, besides the one friend who equates it to ‘‘a catalog for pedophiles,” very few parents have even an inkling of what’s going on.

Which leaves keeping as much dialogue going as possible the best a parent can do, says Deanna Duff, Brittany’s mother.

‘‘I trust my kids that they’re not going to put anything on their grandmother wouldn’t approve of,” she says. ‘‘It comes back down to core family values and parents being parents. You can’t put it on the school system to monitor the kids.”

For all the bluster and to-do, Brittany Duff still thinks this whole MySpace thing has been blown wildly out of proportion, she says.

‘‘It’s just a Web site,” she says. ‘‘It’s not like it can ruin the world or anything.”

Now if only she and her friends weren’t having such a hard time quitting MySpace, she says, laughing — or at least just curbing it a bit.

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