MySpace Sued. Thanks For the Add, Say Lawyers

So, this guy and this girl walk into a bar. Well, okay, not so much a bar as a restaurant. They order burgers, they chat, they flirt. Later on, they decide to catch a movie. For reasons not yet known to experts, they pick Mission Impossible III. (Don’t leave our heroes yet! Remember, anyone can make a mistake.) Not long after the movie is over, they head back to the car and, well, you can probably guess what happens next.

Here’s the kicker: what happens after the what-happens-next part of our story is the real thing. He gets arrested. Why? Turns out that he’s 19 and she’s 14. The two of them met online through MySpace and surprise of surprises, were not honest about their ages. This isn’t a false scenario. Pete Solis of Texas is currently awaiting trail for being the young man in this story. After his amorous relations with a 14-year-old girl became known, he was arrested for having sex with a minor. And while we could discuss all day the merits and pitfalls of such a law, what I find most interesting is not what happened to him, but what is happening to her. Namely, she stands to become, before she can legally drive a car, a very wealthy young woman.

The young woman and her family are suing MySpace for $30 million in damages. They contest that the website did not do enough to protect minors against sexual predators and that they are the victims of said crime. Not since the days of yore was a young woman’s virtue so highly prized. $30 million will net quite the dowry.

I am wary of jumping headlong into any debate that uses either of the phrases “think about the children” or “where were the parents in all this” as its cause celebre, but there’s something about this situation that goes deeper than just childhood behavior and is more far-reaching than tort reform and establishing damage caps.

The family claims that the website didn’t do enough to keep their daughter from being assaulted by a predator. I understand that by legal standards, consent for sex cannot be given if a party is under the proper age, usually 16 in most states. If that happens, even if both parties were of sound mind when the act occurred, a law has still been broken and punishment is still deserved. But, baring any evidence of her unwillingness to go forward with anything and/or his insistence that such a thing happen, this is a case of not understanding the law, not one of active predatory action.

So how, then, can the family honestly bring suit against MySpace? The website itself is a slithering example of how out of control the establishment of an online persona can be. Look at a MySpace page for any given high school student and I challenge you not to walk away from it either needing a fair scrubbing or at least a good anticonvulsant. It’s like staring into a visual map of the brain of an adolescent and, let me tell you, the adolescent brain is a scary place to be. There are no controls that can feasibly work on such a website, at least not without the website itself making some serious changes to the level of ease by which it operates. Such an action, by the way, would no doubt limit its success, making it more clunky to use and thus less popular. This is a serious concern for the website that is the fourth most popular English language page and the fifth most popular in the world, according to Alexa Internet.

I’m not going to assume that the parents of this young woman are negligent. My guess is that they probably believe themselves to be quite active in their daughter’s life. It seems to be that a $30 million lawsuit, aside from being about the chance to make some pain-and-suffering hay out of a nonissue, is more about wanting to control the uncontrollable than anything else. It must be a shock to parents to find out that their child has had sex. Especially if the child in question is of the age where she still needs her parent to sign a permission slip so she can attend a class field trip to a museum.

This situation speaks volumes to me about how isolated we as a society have become. How did people meet their spouses in days of not-too-long-ago? Usually through friends, relatives, co-workers, church groups or community organizations. Now we rely on the Internet. And while online communication has brought the world together in so many ways, we are getting more and more adept at using it to keep ourselves as solitary as possible. There is risk involved in talking to someone face to face. There is fear, and nerves and, at times, abject terror of saying what it is that we want to another person. The mask that an online persona provides is a way of getting around that fear.

But here’s the thing: if we lose the skill to do this, we lose our society. We lose the ability to connect with others and we lose the ability to fight for the most important things in life. We become meaner. We become more jaded. We become less able to compromise and less willing to hear from those who are different from us. This is not to suggest that having a life online is a bad thing. I am very aware that at the end of this post, it will list my alias, not my real name. At the risk of being called a hypocrite, I am not about to advocate the elimination of all online resources and a return to the messenger pigeon. I am saying that it is just as important to keep ourselves healthy in all those areas.

As to political investment, if you want to bemoan the lack of people speaking to their elected representatives, look no further than the absence of a congressional MySpace account for the reasons why.

It's College... Do You Know Who Your Kids Are Voting For?

The Washington Post reported today on a study that purports to show that the faux news program The Daily Show is causing young voters to abstain from voting. According to the story, the study analyzed the students’ attitudes towards politics, President Bush and John Kerry and noted that students who watched The Daily Show had a markedly decreased opinion of all three when compared to those who watched the CBS Evening News.

So, let me get this straight – the population that you have already labeled as apathetic and uninterested in politics self-reports that after watching The Daily Show they have an even gloomier view of the American political stage and the knee-jerk reaction is that The Daily Show has made them less likely to vote? Over this, I am become skeptical.

How far we have come from the 2000 and 2004 elections when the youth vote was hailed (or, you know, not depending on where you got your news) as a major electoral force. Suddenly, the under-30 crowd is labeled as being right back to where it was before: lazy, self-involved, and not to be counted on to make a difference. I don’t know exactly why this crowd gets saddled with these traits. The majority of the youth that I know are quite involved, albeit not necessarily in politics.

Still, the chasm between Apathetic Youth and Participating Member of Society grows despite all evidence to the contrary. Observe the vast numbers of Alternative Spring Break trips every year for one. Go to your local college or university and ask if they have a student volunteer corps of some kind. I promise you, you will find one. Even the much-maligned Greek system, keg parties and hazing rituals aside, tend to be some of the largest philanthropy organizations in any given college town. The youth are constantly giving, whether it is of the very little amount of expendable income that they actually have or of their time to worthy causes.

I admit that I have not read the study in question, so it is entirely possible that I’m missing some key element of the story here, but it hardly seems sensible to me to claim that because one’s views of political candidates are less than robust that it means that a television show has caused a decrease in youth voting. The lack of consideration for youth voting patterns in general seems to be at least one missing element here, although potentially not the most significant.

If the youth of today are watching The Daily Show and it is affecting their view of politics, perhaps politics should consider how ludicrous it is being. In the midst of corruption scandals, blatant political maneuvering that has little actual benefits, and worsening news from the frontlines, surely we can’t lay the blame on Comedy Central. I assure you, Jon Stewart is not poisoning America.

Don’t blame the mirror for the displeasing reflection.