Day -17: MySpace

I've known this for awhile, but most of my 9- and 10-year old students have MySpace accounts. (And yes, you're not allowed to register unless you say you're 14 or older.)

When I started teaching five years ago, I think one of my 32 students had a computer at home with Internet access. Now I think almost a third of my class does. Most of the rest regularly use the Internet at friends' houses or at the library.

I was eating lunch with five students today, and over turkey sandwiches, we started talking about how much TV they watched. "Sometimes I watch 'Lety La Fea,'" Maria said, referring to a popular telenovela, "but I use the computer and MySpace more."

This prompted a whole discussion about their MySpace profiles, how they can protect themselves from the "people who can rape you" on MySpace (as one girl said), spam, friend requests, and Tom. Maria, the most-frequent MySpace user in the group (and the students whose family was considering moving back to Mexico because they are afraid of deportation), was listing off her MySpace friends, most of whom are students in our class, and added, "And then there's Tom."

"Yeah, everyone's friends with him," another girl added. "He started MySpace."

This cracked me up. For you non-MySpace users, there is this guy named Tom who supposedly did start MySpace and who becomes your "friend" as soon as you set up your account. The idea that my peers who are on MySpace and my students all have this same "friend" named Tom - that they and his 179 million other "friends" have never met - is rather odd. How many conversations has Tom inserted himself into?

I was impressed with my students' Internet savvy, their knowledge of Tom, their knowledge that those banner ads they saw for free iPods when they were setting up their MySpace accounts were not something to fall for. I wonder how the Internet and MySpace and YouTube and instant messaging will shape literacy practices and language learning in the future. I am not the first to wonder this, obviously. But I don't think teachers think about it enough.

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On a different but communications-related note, AT&T decided that it's really no big deal to disable the phone system for a school of 850 students and 75 staff members for two days. They are supposedly "upgrading fiber optic cables" in our area, the principal says, and this upgrade involves cutting the current cables before the new ones are up and running. We have had no phone or Internet access for two days. What kind of business, especially one with almost 1000 employees on-site, would stand for this?