I sit on a few listservs, typically these are places in where school educators talk about a variety of issues that are beneficial to a wide number of people. As I was going through emails on Wednesday, I came across an invitation for Quechup sent by one of the listserv subscribers. It was a bit odd and suspicious, but then a few minutes later, another email came across saying to delete any and all emails coming from this site. We had been spammed.

I recognize that many of St. Raphael’s students and alumni are interested in the new wave of “social networking” sites- MySpace, Facebook, Hi-5, Xanga, etc. (you can find a list of many on Wikipedia). However, I wanted to give you a heads up to what exactly Quechup is, in the simplest of forms Quechup takes your addresses in your address book and then quickly sends information to all of your contacts, creating a many emails being sent

You can read more about Quechup in Wesley Fryer’s blog: Beware of Quechup Spam Scam

I admit, I do have a MySpace. I am a member of the “8th largest country in the world.” You can visit it my page at http://www.myspace.com/skiskatenerd. Being the private me, I have it set to “private”, my profile only viewable to my 4 friends. My 4 friends include: my birthday buddy, my sister, my cousin, and an exchange student from a few years ago, each of them I only see on rare occasions, usually requiring a plane ticket and a hotel room. Although, the fact that you can see a picture of me, my age, the state I live in, and the fact that I consider myself “64 inches of pure power,” is still too much information for me.

I was asked today, “Should my soon to be 7th grader get a MySpace?” I almost fell over. I thought to myself, what exactly is a MySpace? I don’t want to appear as the MySpace nay-sayer, as that would be hypocritical on my part. I just want the honesty. I have seen the MySpace page of a student who I know is not “21 years old and living in Rome, Italy”. The other part is the writing in their so called “blog” and when read, it gives you the uneasy feeling because that person they are talking/complaining about is your friend.

So maybe this is what I would say to the soon to be 7th grader. If you really want to become part of the “MySpace Country” please be honest and be yourself. Use it to communicate with your friends that maybe you don’t get to see often enough but don’t let it replace the phone calls, videoconferencing, or the trips you would take to visit them. You only get to be a kid once, enjoy it now.