By nick haskell and robby valderrama
Aaron is your average American teenager. A Saratoga, Calif.,
resident, Aaron often spends his weekends motocrossing,
paintballing, and wakeboarding. During the week, he attends Valley
Christian High School and will graduate this June.
By nick haskell and robby valderrama
Aaron is your average American teenager. A Saratoga, Calif., resident, Aaron often spends his weekends motocrossing, paintballing, and wakeboarding. During the week, he attends Valley Christian High School and will graduate this June.
Sounds like it came straight from a close friend, doesn’t it? But really, Aaron has an account on the popular Myspace.com, the latest online trend where teens can post the most intimate or trivial details of their lives for anyone to see.
With all of this formerly private information open to anyone, wouldn’t people be more hesitant to sign up for a service like this? More and more, the answer is no.
Particularly of late, teens have been flocking to Myspace.com. Some sign up in an effort to meet new friends, but most join because all their friends have. Every page features a bio section, a comment zone, and an area to see your friend’s blog (short for “weblog”). Immersed in the daily routine of keeping up-to-date with their sites, some teens spends hours a day in this effort.
But of course, don’t look exclusively to myspace.com for your burning desire to meet complete strangers. Xanga.com is a fast-growing site as well, with a slightly different focus. Xanga.com, is more of a pure blogging site than a community. Where Myspace.com allows the user to upload his or her picture (and prominently displays it practically everywhere) so that we appearance-crazed teens can see it, Xanga.com allows expression primarily through text, almost like an online diary.
Xanga also encourages comments – along with each comment, the commenter is given an option to leave zero to two “eProps.” What exactly is an eProp, you ask? Well, straight from the site: “eProps are a currency of good will. Give them whenever you read something you enjoy, but reserve a double dose for exceptional posts.” What does this amount to? To be honest, we don’t know. Yet some people are obsessed with the collection and hoarding of these “eProps,” often posting specifically to get them from friends.
What stays the same, however, is that everyone seems to be spending far too much time perusing their peers’ Internet personas. Xanga.com in particular has a “friends list” which sorts by “last updated.” When you’re trying to finish off that English paper, a mere glimpse of a good friend’s name near the top of the list is often enough to cause a distraction.
Teens have always shown themselves to be masters of wasting time. The Internet is the biggest breakthrough in that field since the original Nintendo. These two Web
sites allow for a community
of people to waste time harmoniously. A grand world vision indeed … We’ll start on it tomorrow.
