More on the Ridiculousness of Facebook's Privacy Settings

NYT Graph:

Mark Zuckerburg Likes Settlers of Catan...And Other Ridiculous Things from the World of Facebook

The New York Times posted Facebook's answers regarding a set of questions users submitted last week. And surprise! The answers provided are a TOTAL cop-out.

To wit:

It used to be that I could limit what strangers saw about me to almost nothing. I could not show my profile picture, not allow them to “poke” or message me, certainly not allow them to view my profile page. Now, even my interests have to be public information. Why can’t I control my own information anymore? –sxchen, New York

Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share. We study user activity. We’ve found that a few fields of information need to be shared to facilitate the kind of experience people come to Facebook to have. That’s why we require the following fields to be public: name, profile photo (if people choose to have one), gender, connections (again, if people choose to make them), and user ID number. Facebook provides a less satisfying experience for people who choose not to post a photo or make connections with friends or interests. But, other than name and gender, nothing requires them to complete these fields or share information they do not want to share. If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.

And:

Why not simply set everything up for opt-in rather than opt-out? Facebook seems to assume that users generally want all the details of their private lives made public. – abycats, New York

Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice. We want people to continue to choose Facebook every day. Adding information — uploading photos or posting status updates or “like” a Page — are also all opt-in. Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable. That said, we certainly will continue to work to improve the ease and access of controls to make more people more comfortable. Your assumption about our assumption is simply incorrect. We don’t believe that. We’re happy to make the record on that clear.

On the latest fiasco:

Why must I link to a page for my school, job, or interests and make them public, or delete the information entirely? — Absolutely Not, Chicago

It turns out that less than 20 percent of users had filled out the text fields of this information. By contrast, more than 70 percent of users have ‘liked’ Pages to be connected to these kinds of ideas, experiences and organizations. That is the primary reason we offered the transition — because it reflects the way people are using our service already. While we see tremendous benefit to connecting to interests, we recognize that certain people may still want to share information about themselves through static text. That’s why we continue to provide a number of places for doing this, including the Bio section of the profile. In these places, just as when you share a piece of content like a photo or status update, we give you complete control over the privacy of the information and exactly who can see it. However, we know we could have done a better job explaining all of this and you can expect to see new materials on the site soon. I’m sorry we didn’t do a better job.

Stop being conciliatory and DO A BETTER JOB. No excuses. Be realistic.

But the best part was discovering that Mark Zuckerburg has a very open profile. VERY open. As does his girlfriend. Ridiculous!

Update: Facebook has called an agency-wide meeting tomorrow to discuss their terrible image. Hopefully some major changes will be made.

In Defense of Privacy Or, Why My Sex Life Is None of Your Business

Oddly, over the past couple of years, I have become a person that will answer pretty much anything. I’m not sure how this happened—maybe it’s just being asked interesting, provocative questions, questions I never thought about. Maybe it was the environment I was in. Maybe it’s just my personality. But everyone has their limits. And I’ve learned that many people don’t respect these limits, especially if they deal with sex.

Thanks to the exploits of tons of reality TV stars, it has now become commonplace to know the details of someone’s sexual and romantic history. There are shows devoted to sex rehab! And so, there are some males who feel the need to question me about this aspect of my life. These questions are confrontational and accusatory, as if I’m hiding my adventures from them, even though they are asking for details—inappropriate, lurid, puerile details—that don’t concern them in the least. And when I balk, because I have a right to my privacy, I am met with a torrent of insults.

Listening to these men, it is my duty to go whore myself out, and then report back. I fit the “profile”, based on what I presume to be youth and attractiveness. These men assume that I am hit on constantly and that I am just flat out rejecting all these advances, for reasons that mystify them. And I am mystified that they hold this belief so firmly, when it is so very, very wrong.

Apparently I am not the only one who has wondered where this attitude among men has come from. Does it stem from rejection?

Leah, who has also noticed these assumptions, thinks so. The men are angry and upset because they can’t get laid, and so blame the girls instead. Emily and Petpluto have also written about a version of this (termed The Nice Guy Syndrome, where men feel they own women’s sexuality). I’ve gotten these questions out of sheer curiosity, sure, but also as a way of trying to illuminate The Female Experience for these male friends of mine, even if my experience doesn’t jibe with their experience regarding girls, or what they think is the definitive version of being Young and Female in America Today.

Jezebel also addressed the ostensibly male assumption that women can get laid whenever they want, noting that men view anything less as being overly picky. Prompted by a book review in The Smart Set, Jezebel points out that there are a good many women who are deemed by the culture at large as “unfuckable”. They can fit into a number of categories: old, poor, have weight, genetic, or disability issues, or maybe are just not pretty or conform to a certain beauty standard. Many women fall into this group at a certain point in their life. But they are largely forgotten, ridiculed, always, in popular culture and in real life. For what worth is a women if she is not desirable?

One of the most interesting comments posted to the piece said that men are jealous of women’s sexual power; they are the ones constantly putting themselves on the line:

"a woman can get laid whenever she wants" is an expression of male frustration at female sexual power.

This is not to say that female sexual power is uniformly distributed. Not to say that the world doesn't suck if you've been dealt a poor hand (genetic, medical, social).

Please think for a moment about the male side of this equation. If you're a guy, you don't get hit on. Such an occurance is a memorable life event, not a daily happening. If you're "wing man" to an attractive/sociable/sexually successful guy, then you never EVER get hit on. And you're trying to attract/hit on/get rejected by gals your buddy isn't even looking at. And you adopt this socially demeaning and rejection-filled roll because it marginally increases your odds of some level of sexual success over "going solo".

And in that context, it sucks to be a guy. If the supposedly 'unfuckable' 'hags' in the audience demeaned, debased, and put themselves at the same degree of emotional risk as every guy at the bar, lowered their standards, donned their beer goggles, and shelled out for a few drinks and meals, I'd be willing to bet their "hit rate" would be dramatically higher than for any guy. any. guy.

So yeah, men are envious of womens' sexual power. and being guys, they sum it up (insensitively and coarsely) as, "a woman can get laid whenever she wants".

He’s right that if the game was reversed, the women would do pretty well, but that’s the just the nature of the sexes. But the image that women hold all the power is grossly ill-informed, and by placing the blame onto women, the men just make it worse for themselves.

The statement that all women can get laid easily is also a complete, unjust lie. Undesirable women do feel shame and embarrassment, and no such counseling like “reshape your attitude!” is really going to help; it’s just going to make things worse. Life isn’t a fairytale where a makeover changes everything.

As Leah noted, it’s impossible to live up to whatever the standard is. And being forced to conform to whatever is deemed acceptable is damaging and hurtful. One’s sexual life is only one aspect of a person, and it is mutable.

But the other issue I have with these questions is the appalling assumption that I’m expected to answer such personal and intimate questions, especially in some cases with people I barely know. Why is this acceptable? I consider myself a somewhat private person, in that I believe in privacy and I believe that not everything in my life is up for public consumption, and that attitude, increasingly, some find offensive. There are some things that are none of your business, and no matter how nosy you are, you have to accept that. It’s not impolite or out of hand to say “no.”

So what gives?

It goes back to our increasing TMI culture, and the murky notions of privacy that are constantly being redefined. Facebook has become the very public face of this privacy problem, especially as it has been playing out on the web:

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

--Jeff Jarvis

Where does it? Technologies increasingly are able to monitor every little thing we do. From security cameras in Times Square to GPS locators on our phones to cookies on web pages, there are very little areas or transactions today that are not monitored somewhere, by somebody. We’re so used to this that we accept that mundane calls to customer service lines are recorded, or, if we turn our settings a certain way, we can be tracked by virtually anyone who wants to find us. We do a lot of this out of convenience and novelty; that’s why we save passwords on our computer, that’s why we enable our tweets to be geographically placed.

We like keeping track of our things digitally. That’s why online banking is a hit, and why we like to see the status of a package on Amazon or FedEx. And as long as only we have access to this information, we’re fine. But this information is protected, by passwords and codes and encryption. The debate has turned to less tangible items—memories and statements, ideas and personalities. It’s this violation of truly personal things that has caused this newest uproar.

A theory floating around is as society has become more permissible, old notions of impropriety will disappear, and future generations will have no need for privacy. This is hogwash. I disagree with Penelope Trunk (and others) who say privacy is basically a way of hiding things that don’t need hiding. Really? So everyone—my mother, my colleagues, my boss, my neighbor, the stranger I spoke to last night at a party—is entitled to know everything about me? And I’m supposed to be fine with knowing everything about everyone I know? Sure, maybe that movie you watched last night isn’t super-secret news, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to know about it, just like everyone doesn’t need to know every detail of what you did over the weekend. The notion that privacy just equals secrecy is damaging and erroneous. I am all for transparency, especially in companies, but confusing transparency with a lack of privacy, especially for individuals, is dangerous. Everyone should be able to control what information they tell to specific people; there’s a reason we have “work selves” and “friend selves”, why there are some things you shouldn’t say to your mother but will say to your best friend. Penelope Trunk basically acts like things in our private lives won’t get us into trouble in the workforce, but that’s completely untrue. Sure, standards have relaxed, but that doesn’t mean that showcasing your exploits and your baser aspects of yourself won’t cause some problems. Think of it this way: Would you really want to hear about some borderline criminal activity a coworker or neighbor was doing? Would you want to be responsible for knowing every dirty little secret of everyone you know?

Surprises can be good things. It’s an icky feeling to know things about people before you meet them, because you Googled them. Now you’re an expert on their life. But by having everything up already to be viewed by a public, whether Facebook posts or Flickr albums, the element of surprise, of learning about someone through natural, organic discourse is lost. What’s left to tell? What’s left to discover? If everything about you is already up on the web—reduced to mere anecdote, a selection of tidbits that are “you”, no matter how misleading, embarrassing, or untrue—then why should I bother to try to get to know you anyway, when I already know everything there is to know?

People are not just the sum of their experiences, nor are they defined by particular things. Sure, when we describe ourselves, we do so in this language, often because it is the easiest. But people change, interests and experiences and opinions change. People don’t want to be known by something in their past, especially if they’ve moved past it, or if it’s not accurate. Privacy is important because it gives a sense of control, a sense that you are defining who you are and what’s important to you. Others should not be defining who you are or what you can say; you make that determination.

Facebook, Stop Sucking Ass

As pretty much anyone who uses Facebook semi-regularly knows, the site keeps changing its privacy rules. Not only is this confusing and downright maddening, but it's pissing off a helluva lot of people. I track Facebook's moves somewhat closely, and I've been fed up with them for a while. And I'm a very heavy user. I know the ins and outs better than most, and I've been having trouble wading through this recent mess.

I want better ways to complain, I want to be able to have choices, to control what I want, and I want some of the old features back (I won't list them all). Mark Zuckerburg went from being this wunderkind to this reviled, amoral overlord. Facebook is too wound up in my daily existence, my way of life, for me to just zap it out completely--like destroying the Internet!--but Zuckerburg's vision of the future is not compatible with how users want it to be, and he no longer cares about the vast network he's built. He's transforming the Internet with his conceptions of privacy and openness, not understanding that everyone needs and has the right to privacy. Hell, even when Gawker exposed him, he quickly took control and put his stuff behind privacy walls!

So I am very glad that, among many other website, the Times is on this and has compiled a list of questions they will present to Zuckerburg and Facebook to answer. A response should be up in a few days; I eagerly await it. In the meantime, check out this timeline of privacy changes to the site, and please, check and update your privacy controls! Too many people stay ignorant and they ruin it for the rest of us.

Update: Here's an interactive pie chart, using the same data as the EFF.

Getting My Geek On

LOVE this:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

And what's crazy is that more information than you think is outdated here. Favorite statistic: Facebook needs more than 30,000 servers to run, and they're still growing. Holy shit.

Twitter, Celebrity, and Being Ambiently Aware

The genesis of this post is from the New York Times Magazine story on Twitter that ran in September. Most of it, including everything on Julia Allison, was written following its publication. This is part one out of a two-parter on Twitter; I felt that the second entry was incomplete without this one. I have tried to keep the spirit of my thoughts from several months ago intact, and tried not to reference anything that has since taken place.

A few weeks ago, I contemplated joining Twitter. I liked the idea of posing a question and getting responses, and it’s supposed to be great for business. But then I read “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You”, and said absolutely no way.

Although I’ve previously disparaged the service—a cross between Facebook status updates and AIM away messages—as being a little too connected, a little too much work for me, I toyed with the idea. It’s great for soliciting opinions, finding information, and a lot of businesses are using it this way. In certain industries, often involving the media (marketing, PR, advertising, journalism), it’s touted as a way for journalists to get a feel for what’s out there. Of course, at this point, I know one person on Twitter, and it’s an outgrowth of her job. It’s one of those things that people will join if others are on it. But I still cranked, sounding like a crotchety old fogey, “Why would anyone want to constantly update their profiles every five minutes with what they’re thinking or doing? Who has that kind of time?” It would also take stalking to a whole new level.

But Thompson’s piece, which discusses how social networking sites, specifically Twitter, are creating a whole new type of intimacy, made me think of the status message in a whole new way.

At the basic level, it’s is a version of intimacy—a version that often feels so real it’s hard to remember that’s it’s not true intimacy. Who doesn’t wish for some updated profile, an away message, something, to tide you over when you want to talk to a specific person and they aren’t there?

The overarching point isn’t new; most people find social sites to be a way to keep in touch with friends far easier, a way of keeping everyone up-to-date. They’re also great for networking, for keeping “weak ties”—those people you had class with, long-ago coworkers and neighbors—within reach.

I know for me, online contact has made my relationships richer. In addition to blogs, texting, phone calls and face time, I’ve been able to see what my friends have been thinking. This sounds like I always know everything, but this is far from the case, as very few of these channels are used frequently by any one of my friends and they rarely overlap.

Social networking sites have been a godsend to me. As a kid, I was terrible about keeping in touch—I thought about my friends, I wanted to talk to them, but translating that to action, to write a letter or to call a home line and go through parents, was the hard part. It shouldn’t be, but the privacy of the technological revolution, of everyone having their own email address, Facebook profile, and mobile line, also made it easier to have a private conversation.

Yet the biggest question of all is the future, how our generation (and future ones) will react to having most or all of their life documented. How do you erase those memories when they are up for everyone to see? Before the pictures would be stashed in drawers or albums, if not thrown away—only looked at when stumbled upon, or necessitating a move or some cathartic curiosity. Can you ever get over anyone if you are in constant touch, if their picture or profile is so readily available? Thompson touches on this, using a very common example of a break-up.

I once remember a friend of mine officially announcing her relationship on Facebook. I woke up one Sunday morning, logged onto Facebook, and saw the news. It was inevitable, both the fact they made it official and that one day I would receive major news via Facebook first, but I was disappointed that I hadn’t been told in person before it was online for the world to see. I still feel this way, but I’ve realized that finding out personally first is a rarity now; the first thing most people do when they have major news (especially of a romantic variety) is to broadcast it on Facebook. After all, we realized that they put up this notice immediately after they had the conversation. It’s the easiest way; it saves time, rather than telling all your close friends personally and then letting the news filter through, this way everyone knows at more or less the same time.

But cutting off ties online isn’t so easy, as you cannot erase or force information about other people to disappear just because you are angry, unlike the age-old image of ripping up an old photo. People grow and change, move on and move away…yet you are still connected, still able to follow along the rough outlines of their life regardless of them knowing.

Sociologists call this “ambient awareness”, being aware through constant contact, but in a sort of passive way. We don’t have to actually see people in person, talk to them on the phone; we can just read their updates and “know” them. But we don’t really know them at all; even online contact with good friends is a poor substitute for real contact, as anyone who’s misunderstood an AIM message can attest.

But online interactions open one up to the world. Feeling bored, lonely, left out? Join an online community—there are millions, at least one guaranteed to find something that piques your interest. Seriously. Sounds like a kind of heaven, doesn’t it? People who are willing to talk to you about anything, anytime, sometimes even in real time!

People suddenly seem to have more friends. Quantifying relationships would be a depressing and frustrating exercise—who goes into what category?—but luckily, social networking sites do the heavy lifting for you. The biggest benefit to all of these new relationships is that you suddenly realize that you “know” a lot of people.

Twitter uses followers, not friends, delineating that even those these people are interested in what you say, they don’t know you; you follow information about them, like a favorite star, because they are funny, but you don’t know them personally. It’s just on an incredibly micro level.

But this constant self-disclosure, the openness into the mundanity of life, can define you. Twitter, as much as any other social-networking tool, can be used to foster your identity, to essentially, create yourself as you want others to see you, in all its trite detail.

This brings me to Julia Allison.

I first heard of Julia Allison when she made the cover of Time Out New York’s Valentine’s Day issue. She’s holding up a paper that says “Call me!” and the phone number underneath is her actual number. This fact alone got a lot of press, though apparently she was already somewhat well-known to a type of New York media/tech/web/gossip follower.

Some have called Allison the real-life, Gen-Y version of Carrie Bradshaw, others a type of Paris Hilton, since she’s essentially famous for no reason.

Allison is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time, because she exhibits the type of exhibition and narcissism that is a hallmark of our generation and of the underbelly of our current culture. Her genius, as explored in the August issue of Wired, is that she marketed herself. She wanted to be famous—excuse me, “cult figure”—so she used the tools at her disposal—mainly the web—to get it. Although she has written for AM New York, Time Out New York and is some sort of consultant for Star magazine, these are merely footnotes in her biography. What’s greater is the relationships she’s exploited to become famous. She’s dated a lot of powerful media and tech types, and has written about this in detail in the way that is compulsively horrifying, then adding commentary upon commentary upon other’s criticism of her relationships. It gets very meta, very confusing in the way that is so wonderful and awful about the Internet.

As writer Jason Tanz put it, “Allison’s greatest accomplishment isn’t the volume of content she creates; it’s that she gets anyone to care about it. Her trick, she says, is to think of herself as the subject of a magazine profile, with every post or update adding dimensions to her as a character.”

Wired’s piece, in addition to another fantastic New York Times Magazine feature, this time by Emily Gould, discuss how the Internet blurs reality—how you can get so caught up with going online that your real life outside of the computer no longer feels real. It, essentially, takes over your life. The computer becomes a compulsion, a poor substitute for real human contact. It has saved and helped numerous people immeasurable, but it has also been used for much harm and pain, and we often do it to ourselves. Our little corner can get bigger and bigger, until it engulfs us, and we feel it’s the entire world, and that it’s the only thing that matters.

Internet hype, internet celebrity, does that. At the end of every season, it feels like, to turn on the TV or open a paper, that American Idol is the only thing going on, yet in a few weeks the names will have faded, and in a few years those same names will be reduced to trivia answers. Parlaying internet notoriety is a hell of a lot harder than it sometimes seems, because the nature of the beast is that information moves fast, too fast for most people to play.

But that is the way of the world today, and like they said in the ‘60s, you can “turn on, tune in, or drop out.” Dropping out never seems to last for long, as both Gould and Allison can attest, as they are suckered back in after vowing to keep their lives private. But this break should be more accurately called a respite, since that’s what it is; they never fully extricate themselves from the past they have written, and even if they did, their past is still there for anyone to find.

Social Media Evolution

OpenDiary-->LiveJournal-->MySpace-->Facebook-->LinkedIn-->Twitter

"We Are Living In Exponential Times"

Why it's so exciting and terrifying to live now:




This is what makes me really want to do something with my life.

The song playing is Fatboy Slim's "Right Here, Right Now".

Facebook Parodies Will Never Get Old

Ever.





I hope "World News Feed" is a regular occurrence.

(Sorry for the small size--I'd mess with the HTML, but it probably wouldn't be worth it. Click on the link for best results.)

I love the world

How can you not love the world today when you can access Ashley Alexandra Dupre's MySpace, when the BBC limits employee's Facebook accounts for exactly the reason above (blogs can publish your embarrassing photos to the world!) and when Gawker Jezebel offers up such amusing media criticisms as this?

Megan Meier

When I first heard the Megan Meier “MySpace Suicide” story in November, my first thought was “thank God MySpace didn’t exist when I was thirteen.” I know how easily things go out of whack online, and middle school and high school are hard enough without internet games.

The basis of the story is that Megan Meier, on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, hanged herself in late 2006 after a boy she was friendly with online—but had never met—told her he refused to continue the friendship because she was “mean to her friends.” After insulting her, he signed off with “The world would be a better place without you.”

It turned out that the boy, 16 year-old Josh Evans, was a creation of a neighbor, friends with Megan’s parents and the mother of a girl who used to be friends with her. She knew Megan well—had even taken her along on a family vacation—and so created the account to gain Megan’s trust to learn what she was saying about her daughter. The mom also decided to involve an 18 year-old employee in the prank, using her for help, and told another teen girl who lived across the street.

After a year-long investigation by the Feds which resulted in no charges, the Meiers broke the story to the news media. The St. Charles Journal broke the story locally, and they made the executive decision not to publish the name of the mother who created the fake identity. Bad idea, as bloggers got ahold of the story and with a little investigating, found not only her name—Lori Drew—but her address, phone number, and details of her and her husband’s businesses and local dealings. As the story grew and notoriety spread, the Drews became victims themselves, losing all privacy. On the internet, they were vilified. Their business had to close, they had to put up cameras on their house because people were ready to attack. Once the Times published it the story exploded, which was how I heard about it.

At first, like many others, I was horrified. The woman knew her actions would cause this girl emotional distress, and for an adult to bully a 13-year-old—one who she knew already had problems—was appalling. But the more information came to light, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to see it isn’t so black and white.

None of the accounts I’ve read, including blog entries, ever brought up the topic of revenge or the fact that, as it seems to me, hanging oneself is a premeditated action, not a sudden inkling to obliterate yourself by swallowing massive amounts of pills. Hanging takes planning, gumption, and knowledge, as you have to know how to kill yourself with the least of amount of pain possible. It reminds me of a memorable scene in The Sopranos where Chris is injecting heroin into his arm: doing this drug takes work, boiling water, tightening the muscle, finding the proper vein, loading the needle with the drug, having the right angle, all to pass out in exhaustion. Too much effort for a high. Megan Meier, for some reason, had decided that hanging was the way she was going to kill herself, and she decided this long ago.

Which brings me to the conclusion that Megan Meier had been planning to kill herself—or at least attempt suicide—before that particular day. She had been bullied online for a while, so maybe she came to this conclusion a few days earlier and at the last contact she decided she was ready to put her plan into motion. So in that regard, Lori Drew did basically lead her to her death.

But I’ve also thought a lot about why Lori Drew would do what she did. She knew what she did was wrong. She’s said that she wanted to mess with the girl. But she takes no responsibility for it, which is insane. She basically said that the girl was troubled anyway so it didn’t matter what she did to her. What kind of logic is that? No, obviously if the girl was troubled, and you knew it, intentionally causing her pain and distress isn’t going to make things all better. A normal teenager girl wouldn’t have killed herself, but she sure would feel that her life was over.

I understand revenge, which to me is what this boils down to. It’s misplaced revenge, though. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like Ms. Drew’s daughter came up with the idea; she was just carried along with the hoax. It’s been implied that it was Ashley Grills, the 18 year-old employee of Ms. Drew’s, who came up with the idea. It makes perfect sense that an 18 year-old would devise that scheme: she is old enough to understand MySpace and dynamics with other girls, old enough to understand the culture yet still be firmly enmeshed with it that she can work it inside and out. She would be excited by this game, and hey, it would only help her in her boss’s eyes. She would know that it would be easy to create a fake account, and Lori Drew would fill in the details. Preteens and manipulation are practically like braces and bad hair: it’s a requisite of the age. They naturally go together. It’s impossible to break away from the pack mentality at that age, and mean girl behavior is rampant. Causing pain and humiliation is practically automatic.

Bullying now is so pervasive because it can follow you everywhere. Technology has made nasty messages both persistent and replicable. Can you imagine hearing about this in school? You’d immediately hit up the MySpace profiles in question and marvel at the gossip. The idea of facing this in school is enough to make any teenager consider suicide as a viable option.

What I didn’t realize until after a few days of obsessively following this story was that I had been a target of internet bullying. I had never quite put it in those terms before, but it was true. And then it struck me how much better equipped I was to deal with this type of harassment at 20 than I would ever have been as a teenager. At 20, I had a life where I was able to escape the harassment: I had tons of supportive friends, I had a job and school to keep me busy, all separate things that had nothing to do with the people who were harassing me. But no matter how hard I lobbied, I could never get anything to stick to the perpetrators. Although I came with proof—hard copies of the MySpace and Facebook messages, things pinned to my bedroom door—and witnesses of behavior, no charges ever stuck. It was grossly unfair.

And that’s why I feel that Lori Drew should be charged. MySpace has just been issued a subpoena, so the process is starting. There should be laws on the books about internet harassment. It gets murky when it deals with schools, because if things happen off the premises the schools often cannot intercede, but clearly technology informs our relationships with other people, and we cannot tote the benefits of instant connection without understanding the drawbacks and minimizing it as much as possible. Parents can only do so much. Megan Meier didn’t really do anything stupid—who could blame a sad, lonely girl from talking to a boy who seemed to like her?

For those of you who think “Megan’s mom should have monitored her use of MySpace,” she did. She wouldn’t let her have a MySpace unless it was private, which is why she questioned how Josh knew her. She would always be in the room when she used the site. And when she heard about the comments Josh said, she told her to log off immediately and to cut off contact. While she was making dinner, mulling over the situation that they were to continue discussing during the meal, Megan hanged herself in her closet.

How can you monitor the internet? Ms. Meier knew about all of this, and while she didn’t approve, she knew that belonging to the site—a necessity in the preteen world—and interacting with peers was not only a fact of modern life but made Megan feel happy and that she belonged. While both Facebook and MySpace have received loads of negative press, the roots of it have been very different, mainly due to the type of people who use the sites and the culture within them. MySpace has always had a problem with anonymity, since people don’t use their real names, and with child predators. Facebook is hipper, caters to an educated and (increasingly) adult clientele and has complex business-y problems but privacy issues of a different sort, with Beacon and open-source applications—not things that parents and teenagers care about. Undoubtedly as a result of this tragedy, MySpace has instituted some new policies, the most notable being that all profiles under 18 will automatically be private. Regardless, there is no effective way to prove who you are with just an account.

One of the reasons this story is so fascinating is that it has multiple angles from which to analyze it. This will become a case story in journalism classes, because it deals with sensitivity, privacy, and whether or not to reveal sources—and proves that today, especially with a juicy story people will find out what they are desperate to know. Lots of people felt that because Lori Drew violated Megan Meier’s privacy it was justified for her privacy to be violated as well. The idea of vigilante justice, and how the internet feeds this, is another hot topic. Should we burn down Lori Drew’s house? Up until a few days ago, the only person charged with anything in this case was Megan’s father, Ron Meier, who smashed a foosball table the Drews were hiding in their basement as a Christmas gift for their kids. That’s actually how the police first heard the story, since the Meiers dumped the destroyed table on the Drews’ lawn with a nice welcome message. Honestly, I can’t blame them. A lot of other folks—and it’s all over the internet—would have and want to do a lot worse.

As more and more details emerge the story has just become even murkier. I will be following it. I hope that because of this case, anyone who thinks that messing around with some little annoyance for kicks will realize that it does real damage.

Other links of importance:

http://www.megansvigilantes.blogspot.com/
http://jezebel.com/search/megan+meier/byviews/
The contested blog of meganhaditcoming.com does not exist anymore.
I have yet to read The New Yorker article.

All thanks to friends...

I've been thinking of starting a blog for years. Finally, like many other things in my life, I just decided to go "Fuck it!" and do it. That was probably close to two months ago. I still have a huge list of entries I want to post on--every day the list seems to grow as I read another great article in the Times or some observation that I feel needs to be remarked upon.

Thought of the week, as it was never addressed on Sex and the City: If you hook up with someone that you are not Facebook friends with, is there a responsibility for one to do the friending?

Facebook etiquette never fails.