MySpace Sued For Touching Somebody'sSpace

Technology again proves to be a bad mother. At least in the eyes of some moms and dads. Check it out...

MySpace, for those who have fulfilling social lives, is like a second internet. It's like an ever-growing yearbook, full of people from your high school, home town, and people who slept with people who slept people who are now teachers back in your old home town. It is open to anybody who wants to share their stories, their favorites, or just show off.
You get a "Profile" that you build to suit your personality. Some of them are perfectly suited to the people who built them: All flash, no bang. Bare bones. Dumb. Hyperactive. Busy-bodied. Some even have backgrounds of a waist-up-naked Bea Arthur painting. I have blogs over there, too, many of which are a little more hard-edged than this one. None of them touch the edge on the face of a breezy Bea in her late-30s.

Mostly, MySpace gives anybody who wants one the chance to express themselves. And most of the time, the folks there meet expectations: They have nothing to say. Just a few pictures of themselves getting drunk, pictures they took themselves. Tongue-out, hands extended, friends on the arm. Over and over. Siiiiiiigh. Life was so much simpler before other people's lives became public domain. Then again, it's got kids of all ages, some famous people's profiles with tidbits, and the rest of the hoi polloi.

It's fascinating, it's weird, it's voyeuristic, and it's almost as addictive as coffee ice cream-flavored heroin sleeping patches.

MySpace, like any other piece of technology involving people, has little to no built-in screening process. All one needs is a computer and an internet connection and they are likely to get on it. I use it as another way to handle comedy and events. Lots of bands and others like me do that, also. But like any other people-connecting technosphere, perverts get into the mix and things get unseemly.

One of the best ways I ever saw to stop this was when a comedian, Doug Stanhope, would go into chat rooms and pretend to be an underage boy or girl and bait scumbags into inappropriate situations. Then he'd copy the text and paste it to his website, and spring the trap on the scumbag. If nothing else, it would nearly force infarctions on those bottom-feeders. But we have something worse now...

Kids on MySpace are getting baited into meeting people they communicated with via MySpace, and some of those kids have been beaten, molested, and abducted. The natural reaction of the parents, any parent whose child went through this terrible ordeal, is to... RIIIIIGHT... sue MySpace! MySpace has a lot of money, mind you, and it should really be a better parent. It should make sure everyone plays nice and brushes their teeth. MySpace should be held responsible every time somebody with an account on their has a car accident, DUI, or diarrhea!

I feel really terrible for those kids. Their lives are changed forever, and part of that equation was MySpace. I cannot tell you how terrible it must be for those kids to realize they get more attention from strangers than from their own family. That doesn't excuse what the scumbags who should rot in prison (in between games of "Prison MySpace Invaders") did to the kids. Nothing does. I just really wish that parents would monitor what their kids are doing on the internet. First it was the dangers of being in public. Now it's the dangers of being on the computer. I guess all that's left is the safety of low-income housing, with no malls and no internet connections.




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