Ethics Newsline®

Last week a friend sent me a Los Angeles Times column about the perils of MySpace.com. As a mother, she told me, she’d been “monitoring items posted by young people” on that social networking website for five months, a process which “has tempted me to feel aghast.” The Times column — “Testing the Bounds of MySpace,” by Catherine Saillant, front-paged on April 8, 2006 — recounted Ms. Saillant’s experience as her 13-year-old daughter became (unknown to her mother) something of a MySpace guru for her friends.

MySpace, a free interactive site, invites users to create profiles of themselves, write comments, post personal pictures, share audio and video files, and maintain lists of friends. Combining elements of a dating service and a gossip page, it is wildly popular with teens and twenty-somethings, claiming roughly 90 million members. It has attracted intense interest in commercial circles, having been sold to Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation a year ago for $580 million. It also has drawn a strong moral critique from many observers.

So far, however, that critique has too often settled for stereotypes and missed the larger ethical point. The problem is not simply that MySpace postings include foul language, malicious gossip, and obscene gestures. Those things happen among youth everywhere, and squelching MySpace probably won’t change that. Nor is it that the site reveals a youthful fascination with popularity, as evidenced by the status conferred on those who build large lists of “friends.” That, too, comes with the adolescent turf. Nor does the problem lie with the site’s absorption of huge amounts of bandwidth (especially under the weight of video file-sharing), nor with its vulnerability to attack from hackers, nor even with its use for commercial rather than social purposes by those plugging new clothing lines or promoting new bands. Those challenges plague the Web in all its incarnations.

The critique, instead, should focus on the site’s blatant encouragement of dishonesty. Moving through four stages, that encouragement begins, first, with the natural desire to find new friends and greater acceptance, which MySpace shifts from face-to-face interaction to cyberspace encounters. What’s lost in the shift is a kind of reciprocal correction mechanism. What’s missing is the in-person pushback from friends and adults that operates through thousands of visible and linguistic hints, telling young people what works and what doesn’t. Calibrating their identities along a scale of courage that runs from timidity to bravura, young people rightly ask themselves, “Am I too brash or too fearful?” Face-to-face interaction sends back highly nuanced and helpful answers. MySpace sends back hardly any, except those that encourage bravado and self-promotion.

Absent those in-person signals, then, what’s to prevent dissembling? The second phase involves a kind of low-grade duplicity. If social rewards go to the cool, and my life isn’t cool, why not tweak my profile and invent a different history? One of the most common prevarications on MySpace, apparently, is lying about one’s age. MySpace tries to maintain a 14-year-old user floor. That rule is hard to enforce: What easier way to appear cool, after all, than to assume an older, more worldly identity? Many 14-year-olds are still emerging from the cocoon of childhood, where to play was to create happy fantasies about dragons, fairies, and other delicious fictions of youth. Little wonder, then, that the temptation to “play” on the Internet is, for some, an irresistible invitation to make things up.

The fact that such play involves deliberate duplicity opens the door to the third stage. It leads its perpetrators into a kind of unrecognized hypocrisy, where they complacently profess to be something they aren’t. That seems a particularly cruel trap for the young, who rightly pride themselves for having a keener nose for adult hypocrisy than the adults themselves. The sad result of the MySpace culture is that it tolerates and even applauds this slide into significant hypocrisies, causing its users to do what they rail against adults for doing — leading double lives, glossing over significant perversions, and engaging in actions and relationships that can only flourish in the dark — on a scale beyond anything we’ve experienced in the past.

The fourth stage, arising from the darkness of hypocrisy, is frankly dangerous. Dulling their sense of wrong in themselves, this hypocrisy can blind them to wrongdoing in others — especially in those who would prey on them. It even leads them to assert, to parents and others, that this is my private space, not yours — and if you don’t like my ethics, you don’t have to look. Soothed by a willing suspension of disbelief in their own stories, they grow less wary of duplicity in themselves and in others. That makes them more susceptible to predators searching for undefended innocence — the greatest fear of parents, and the source of the most wrenching tales in the annals of MySpace.

The real danger of MySpace, then, is the culture of predatory immorality that it supports. But the corrective doesn’t come from insulating young people from the world. It lies in helping them create a culture of integrity and caring. Young people who understand the ethics of cyberspace encounters — that privacy, modesty, honesty, decency, and respect are as important online as in person — build a defense against the involuntary hypocrisy so foreign to their real identities. That way, they’re better able to spot the predators, warn their friends, and lead lives where what seems to be is what really is.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics