Sex is FREE!

I built my first homepage in early 1995. I have always loved home pages built by people who talk about anything and everything that is of interest to them. I admire someone who will go through the trouble of documenting their life and hobbies to teach others. It takes a bright and intelligent individual to figure out how to make a website and then consistently add to it.

MySpace

Today however, the web is not reserved for bright people anymore and every vapid attention seeker and her dumb little brother can have a MySpace page or a Facebook account. When Kendra Wilkinson or Brody Jenner refer to their MySpace page as their official blog, I just cannot help but chuckle. How can you say this in the same breath as you talk about business and professional aspirations. A few years ago people would have told me to shut my elitist mouth up because MySpace did give us celebrities like Tila Tequila. What would we be without Tila?! In two years will we be asking “Where would we be without Tina Chen“? The state of the world is so glib that the bar has dropped very low on acceptable distractions. Anything will do.

Facebook

I have never had a MySpace account but I joined Facebook after a few friend nagged me to join (By that I mean in person nagging, not stupid e-mail spam notifications.) While Facebook is getting dumbed down, it is possible to configure it so you don’t have to suffer the consequences. Today I only have a few applications and they all display things that I have made myself such as my pictures, my videos, my Kiva.org businesses, my crafts, RSS feeds from 4 blogs (but not this one) and the few books I have read through. No glitter text porn star name for me (though I am very proud to not only, have a “porn star name”, but own the accompanying domain name too LOL) Basically my motto is: “If I didn’t painstakingly make it myself, it does not belong on my Facebook profile.”

I am quick to point out to people the security problems associated with certain settings in Facebook especially when it comes to viewable pictures that might depict something that is funny to them and their friends but perhaps not appropriate to show friends-of-friends or the public at large. That’s when they usually think I am a crazy stalker and ignore me until they run into someone they barely know who make salacious comments about their new thong bikini.

I discovered that there are crazy mass befrienders and pedophiles on Facebook when I became friends with Yoshi’s (TPB’s) 13-year-old brother Chibiyoshi. I triangulated all of his “friends” dropping the schoolmates and sports celebrities only to wind up with a list of a dozen random adults he did not seem to know in person. These people were either “friends” with a whole bunch of teenage boys or published inappropriate content (pictures and video) to his SuperWall. I went over the profile with Yoshi and we identified all the inappropriate applications that give access to him (by unknown adults) and Yoshi took care to clean up his little brother’s profile (and endure the firestorm of complaints and anger that ensued obviously.) As adults we are responsible for his well being even if we are not his direct parents. Too many kids are hurt while unrelated adults mind their own business. I think it is hard to explain to young teenagers how adults use their photos because they do not have a sophisticated understanding of “adult sexual intent” and most likely will never fully understand criminal, sexually deviant, psycopathic or sosciopathic intent. The number of these people is not great but applications like Facebook makes it easier for them to find you in search by searching through high schools. After almost 20 years on BBses and the Internet, I am still learning the makeup of the intent, desires and thought process or people who fall into those categories. After using Facebook to track and hunt down a very active criminal I can also appreciate that Facebook is a great counterstrike tool as well.

I feel that I must do something though to warn parents who’s 13 year olds will soon have access to Facebook as they enter high school next month. I live in a French speaking area and I fear French speaking parents do not have access to adequate information to understand and supervise their teen’s access to Facebook. The few articles written on the subject are only available in English and they only scrape the surface of how Facebook works. There are other issues as well because Facebook will most likely be the first public forum that teens access where online responsibility is a must. Because Facebook associates everything to your real name, great care must be taken when you use it.

But then again, sometimes we can be glad some dumb people don’t.

I was going to write about how I love Facebook too but I’ll keep it for another time…

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