I.T. to Teacher

Alyssa commented about my MySpace post, and I want to respond, but since it's down the page a bit I figured I'd bring it to the top like this.

I respect the fact that you have an opinion to a certain site. Yes, it is true us teens love to express ourselves and we love to flaunt what we have to the world on the internet. I myself love the internet in general, no matter what site I am on. To me, it's all about the closests friends and family. And no doubt the 'in crowds' and the 'cool group' is what teens are into right now, not all of them are. including me...

~Alyssa; Michigan, USA; 14 yrs. old

Thanks for commenting, Alyssa. I don't often respond to comments, but you brought some things to mind, and I want to address them.

I have no problem with people doing the trendy thing. Heck, look at me, I'm blogging. Now, being trendy for the sake of being trendy, that's another story for another time.

MySpace, like Geocities, has it's place in the internet spectrum. It is a place for people to stretch their wings and start figuring out what they can do with this thing they call the internet. Not everyone is going to be able to write good web pages. I did for a while, but those days are long gone (and good riddance to them). Now, like many people, I use a common tool for my place on the internet because now I'd rather have easier than better. If you browse random blogs here on Blogger you'll see many that look the same (there's only so many templates to choose from), and many that sound the same (blah blah blah). I try to set myself apart from the crowd by having a blog with a purpose and scintillating content, not just a place to post which movie I saw this weekend. Like you, my target audience is my friends and family. Visitors like you are just a bonus.

The thing that surprised me about MySpace is that as much as my students talk about it, and as popular as it is, there seems to be very little effort or thought put into most of the MySpaces out there. I just looked at some random Spaces, and may have only found bad ones (try stumbling around the internet and see what percentage of good sites you hit, it's probably pretty low, too). The tool used for creating a MySpace without needing a huge amount of time and ability may not lend itself to creating distinctive pages. I don't know.

It probably boils down to the fact that I am not quite twice the age of most of my students. I'm an old fogey who just doesn't understand kids these days. Why, back in my day....