Big Brother is IMing You

A school invades the MySpace of its students.

By Max Kardon
Thursday February 9, 2006

My little brother spends hours online every day, and he’s not a computer nerd, fetishist, or social outcast. In fact, he’s a fairly regular teenager, and he’s on www.Myspace.com.

Perhaps nothing disturbs the typical teen like him more than the thought of his parents and teachers peering into his private life. Fiercely protective of their privacy, teenagers unsurprisingly feel uncomfortable sharing their more illicit secrets and habits with adults. But coupled with that insularity, most teenagers also have a deep need to connect and share with their peers. Nothing contributes more to teenaged angst and depression than loneliness.

For today’s teenager, this inherent contradiction can be resolved online, in the form of a Myspace, Friendster, or Facebook page. Through one of these web-based networking services that we all pretend we don’t spend hours on each day, a student can set up a loosely linked group of friends and acquaintances, introduce himself to others with similar interests, and expand his social circle, all while avoiding the prying eyes of parents and teachers—until recently.

The administrators at my brother’s private high school in Philadelphia decided to initiate an Internet Myspace "sting operation" by lurking around Myspace and checking up on the pages of their young charges. Later, they claimed that they desired nothing more than to protect their students from online pedophiles.

At my brother’s school, many of the students have Myspace pages, where they list information about themselves. My quick survey of the pages reveals nothing particularly prurient, but there is some information that might interest parents. Several students posted surveys where they admit that they’ve tried cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana. Some students claimed to have fallen in love at least once.

One might think that parents and teachers alike would be heartened to learn that their kids apparently aren’t spending all their free time having oral sex or building homemade meth labs, as some mainstream media outlets might like us to believe. There was nothing wildly alarming on their pages. If anything, visiting Myspace might reassure authority figures and parents that kids today have the same concerns that they did at the same age.

But the administrators at my brother’s school look at it differently. Their survey revealed that a surprising number of their students make snide jokes, use profanities, and acknowledge the existence of sex (heaven forfend!). Two weeks ago, the administrators decided to pull aside a group of students whose Myspace profiles they deemed "most inappropriate” – including my brother. Students were told to censor themselves and expect further school-sponsored surveillance. Those who refused would face "serious disciplinary actions."

Myspace has never been a completely private thing for most of these students; after all, you can search for their profiles and find them instantly even if you are not a registered user. However, the students expected that their Myspace pages existed separately from their in-school persona. Students might occasionally need a space to vent, to shout their opinion into the void. At least one student had a complaint about a particular teacher up on his personal page until the week of the school’s sting. Students rightly expect that once they leave their school, as long as they aren’t breaking the law, they are allowed to behave, dress and think as they choose.

Parents might find looking at their child’s Myspace page helpful. But demanding that students muzzle themselves strikes me as inappropriate authoritarianism.

It’s also wrong to launch an official school program to monitor students’ Myspace pages without informing the students first. Some of the students might have censored themselves and removed information that didn’t cause trouble. After all, who wants the principal to know where you went over the weekend, who you’re dating, and what kind of abrasive music you enjoy making in your spare time?

Lurking around your students’ social lives (and Myspace is indeed a social universe of its own) is not a way to foster trust. Students will be less likely to open up to someone who snoops around without telling them.

Teenagers today lead differently structured lives than they did 50, 25, or even 10 years ago. Authority figures concerned with the doors opened by the Internet should not succumb to sensationalism and prurient reporting. But I’m afraid that "stings" like this will probably soon be part of most high schools’ disciplinary programs.

So my brother will muzzle himself on Myspace from now on, but is it really a good thing to stifle a mechanism that helps teens express themselves? I think not.

 
Max Kardon graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and recently returned from a year teaching English in Thailand.