Monday, June 12, 2006

Social networking meets hysterical 'news' reality show

I must admit that I was sucked completely into watching a special TV report here in the US about sexual predators on sites like MySpace. To prove the point that it’s not just people in big cities who go online (and who exactly was the target audience for this newsflash?), the producers of Dateline NBC went to my home state of Ohio in order to lure sexual predators into honeytraps. It was, as I expected, gripping television.

The producers and police offers had the help of an organisation called Perverted Justice, which specialises in using actresses as bait to help the authorities catch online sexual predators. While the group has come in for criticism from some, they can also claim to have weeded out a fair number of paedophiles.

Unfortunately, the piece was little more than propaganda which will help legislation to ban kids using blogs and social networking sites in public libraries and schools. It would have been laudable if NBC had given as much time to trying to understand what MySpace actually is - and how kids use it - as they did to throwing out hysterical statistics about how many kids do things online that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about. Indeed, they could have done with a look at social anthropoligist Danah Boyd’s claim that kids are safer on MySpace than paedophiles are, due to the large law enforcement presence on such sites. Instead, the show proved once more than the media - like politicians - are awfully keen to prescribe ‘solutions’ for problems that either do not exist or do not exist as they imagine they do.