As freedom shrinks, teens seek MySpace to hang out (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - They paper their virtual walls withkittens and cartoon characters, give their address asCandyland, their age as 103 and announce they are yearning fortrue love.

Welcome to the secret, yet very public, world of youngteens who are flocking to social-networking Internet sites bothto chill with friends and to figure out the timeless adolescentquestion "Who am I?"

Although originally aimed at 20-somethings interested inindependent music, Web sites like MySpace.com, which is ownedby News Corp (NYSE: - ), have attracted an enormous followingamong middle school students, and cultural theorists say it'snot hard to see why.

As the real world is perceived as more dangerous with childabductors lurking on every corner, kids flock online to hangout with friends, express their hopes and dreams and bare theirsouls with often painful honesty -- mostly unbeknownst to theirtech-clumsy parents.

"We have a complete culture of fear," said Danah Boyd, 28,a Ph.D student and social media researcher at the University ofCalifornia Berkeley. "Kids really have no place where they arenot under constant surveillance."

Driven to and from school, chaperoned at parties and oftenlacking public transport, today's middle-class American kidsare no longer free to hang out unsupervised at the park, thebowling alley or to bike around the neighborhood they way theydid 20 years ago.

"A lot of that coming-of-age stuff in public is gone. Sokids are creating social spaces within all this controlledspace," said Boyd.

LIFE SUPPORT

The ranks of Santa Monica, California-based MySpace.com hasswollen to more than 73 million members in two years, making itthe second-biggest Web domain after Yahoo in terms of pageviews. Other popular teen sites are Friendster.com, Tagged.com,Xanga.com and Orkut.com.

Most MySpace members live in the United States but aBritish version was launched this year and Australia will benext.

More than half of 15- to 20-year-olds who are online areusing MySpace, according to the company's research. They usethe site's design technology to create personal "spaces" thatresemble a cross between a high school locker and a secretdiary.

Researchers say older teens and 20-somethings use the sitemore for friendship, sharing music and arranging meetings andparties.

The younger set use it to chill with known friends and workout their own identity. Some construct fantasy lives of vastwages, luxury cars and say they are searching for "live-inpimps." Others confess touchingly to being geeks, loving uncoolmovies like "The Sound of Music" or list their puppy as theirlover.

"Building identity is a lot of what a teen-ager is. Themajority feel they don't fit in," said networking consultantRoss Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network.

"This is the first generation for which it is entirelynatural to socialize in a digital environment. Mobile phones,instant messaging, texting and being online really are theirlife support," Dawson said.

ADULT ALARM

Under-14s are not supposed to use MySpace but tens ofthousands ignore that stipulation, inventing ages and highschool careers still beyond their reach, and sometimes postingsexually precocious pictures.

To meet concern over possible sexual exploitation ofchildren, MySpace hired a safety czar in April and requiresunder-18s to review safety tips before registering. It alsorestricts the profiles of under-16s to users they know.

It says it has deleted more than 250,000 profiles ofunder-14-year-olds since 2004 on the basis of tips by parentsand algorithms that search the site looking for keywords andphrases that identify very young users.

"We are now deleting something like 5,000 under-ageprofiles a day," said Shawn Gold, head of marketing forMySpace.

Gold said the dangers should be kept in perspective. "IfMySpace were a state it would be twice the size of California,but the crime associated with it would be a five-block area ofNew York City."

For all the adult alarm over the coarse language andprovocative poses often seen on such sites, Boyd said teens aredoing just what they have always done.

"Adults are not normally privy to these teen-ageexpressions. But when teens hang out in public they do thesestupid things and they always have.

"Teens are trying to figure out their sexuality for betteror worse. It's a problem for parents to pretend like it doesn'texist. If parents have an open mind and can hear their teensexpressing themselves in all their ridiculousness, they canmake sense of it and it stops being so scary," she said.

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