For over a year I’ve been warning my students to steer clear of MySpace. Don’t get a MySpace account. If you get one anyway, don’t post anything explicit on it. If you post explicit things anyway, use a pseudonym. Be careful, be careful, be careful. Don’t post anything that might cost you a possible job. Employers search MySpace looking for potential problems. Parents search MySpace looking for their kids. Your girlfriend/boyfriend/s parents search MySpace looking for dirt about you. People get stupid on MySpace, and post such detailed descriptions that predators are led right to the front door. People forget that the internet is a very public place and if someone posts pictures of a somewhat skimplistic sort and those pictures are found and trouble ensues, that person need not bother to act all surprised and hurt because let’s face it: if you posed for those pics and you know how to post pics on there, you did it expressly so people would look at them; you know people are going to find them and some of those people will know you FOR REAL. Some of those people might even be paying your salary, for the time being, at least. I do not in the least blame an employer for not wishing the employees to be, let us say, “exposed” to the general public, via MySpace. (or any other Space, for that matter.) Employees are representatives of the business even off-duty. Yes, we have ‘lives’ and we have a right to those lives, but real grownups understand what can happen to people who don’t have the brains to use a little discretion. People can have fun with a MySpace account without telling all and showing even more.

Someone who might have considered you for a high-paying position might change his/her mind after seeing your “Girls Gone Wild” poses, or your “Look At Me, My Pants Fell Down” capers, all carefully laid out in montage form for the world to see. With music. And a YouTube video.

I think sometimes that people forget that the world lives next door, too. Grandma lives in the world, and so does your boyfriend/girlfriend’s father, the one with the huge gun collection. These days, Grandma is online almost as frequently as you are, so BE CAREFUL.

Be Careful. Be Careful. Be discreet. Be tasteful.

Yeah, whatever.

I opened a MySpace account last week. One of my former students, now all grown up and on his way to college, asked me to, so it would be easier to keep in touch. This kid has been able to twist me around his little finger since he was in junior high, so when he asked me to open an account and make a page, I did. I was almost immediately beseiged (the good kind) by people I hadn’t seen since my own junior high days. I found one of my sisters on there. I found people who are on my blogroll on there. It’s a view through a different window than the regular blogging window. Yes, people do blog on MySpace but I don’t. I blog here.

But over on MySpace, I am hearing from old friends who were able to find me there, and I love it. Go ahead, try to find me there. I dare you.

And if you do, add me to yours.

I am beginning to understand why it’s caught on, and why people love it.

But I still maintain that people should not post things of an uncertain nature there or anywhere else. There are times when we stand in the window and wave at all the voyeurs, and times when we draw the curtains and do our thangs. For example, I would put YOU on my friend list any time, but I would never even consider putting any of my students on there. Not while they were my students, anyway. After? Maybe. But during? Never.

Yup. Sometimes we draw the curtains and sometimes we don’t need to.

Be smart enough to know which is which, ‘k? Thankyouverymuch.

Please note that I am not even going to get into the ‘underage moronic kid who posts suggestive pics and is willing to meet a stranger who claims to be fifteen and hot, but who is really a 400-pound forty-year-old man who lives in his mother’s basement’ thing. That, my friends, is a sign of parents who are neither tech-smart nor attentive; and in this day and age, either of those can be a death sentence for a child. Back in the day, we went to ‘those’ places on the other side of town because our parents didn’t know enough about them to forbid it. Or maybe they did forbid it, and that made those places that much more desireable. These days, the kids are still going to ‘those’ places for the same reasons. One of the differences is, the bad guys can come right to your house instead of having to set up a meeting at a dive. Or both, depending on how stupid your kid is, and how much or how little you pay attention to what he/she is doing on the computer. Most parents have never even thought to search for their child on MySpace. I find that unbelievably neglectful in this day and age.

I guess I got into it anyway, huh. Sowwy.