To MySpace or Not To MySpace

Last week, on a trip to Pennsylvania, I met a smart young guy who was nightclerking at our hotel. He'd done a year and a half at Wooster; but then decided not to go deeper into debt for a B.A. He seemed to be doing well at self-educating, so we talked about William Faulkner, James Joyce, H. L. Mencken, other worthies, his life in music, and lots of other things. The subject of blogs would arise. We were both bloggers, we discovered; and we agreed that he'd show me his, if I showed him mine. So, I showed off Cliopatria and then he went to his site at MySpace. It looked like alien territory to me.

So, I get back to Atlanta and I'm reading around the history blogosphere. Lo, there's Mills Kelly's post at edwired to bring me up to speed. Undergraduates use e-mail, he's learned, to communicate with"old people." Welcome to antiquity, Mills. Undergraduates keep in touch with each other, he learned, via MySpace, FaceBook, LiveJournal, Text Messaging, Instant Messaging, and Telephone. Kelly cites data that tend to confirm these findings. MySpace boasts 27 million and LiveJournal has 9.3 million users. LiveJournal's demographic is two-thirds female and largely 18-21."So, for example, there are ten Livejournal users aged 18 for every one aged 30 and more than three 18 year-olds for every 25 year-old," says Kelly.

Facebook and Myspace do not publish similar information on their sites, but given the fact that Facebook users must have college/university or high school issued email addresses to sign up, the average Facebook user must be even more heavily weighted to the 18-21 year-old demographic.

What surprised me, a bit, was Kelly's conclusion:

What does this mean for history educators--beyond the depression that acceptance of our dinosaur status will induce?
First and foremost it means that we are going to have to start using these new communication platforms, and fast. Otherwise our students will be engaging in a dynamic and freewheeling conversation that we have no access to. But it also means that we are going to have to think carefully about how educational purposes can be best served in these new platforms. After all, education is what we're good at, isn't it?

Well, yes. If I think about the experience of my younger colleagues at Cliopatria, however, the results seem mixed. In addition to his blog, Rob MacDougall has one of LiveJournal's 9.3 million accounts. Like people half his age, he uses it primarily to stay in touch with friends. Because I've become a friend, everything he writes is interesting, and he posts there more often than on his blog, I read it occasionally. Education doesn't seem to be the direct aim, but I learn something new every time I read what Rob writes.

On the other hand, Hugo Schwyzer tells a different story. Every member of his youth group has a MySpace account and, like me, he told them that he, too, has a blog. They found his blog boring. At their urging ("Get a Myspace, Hugo, and you can be our friend!"), he set up a MySpace account. But he closed it last summer. You should read his reasoning about it. Briefly put, it was for the same reasons that I stopped reading the closed chat-room of my students at Antioch. I had ready access to it and could have easily entered the discussions, but I was similarly stunned by what was said there. Reading what they posted helped me to understand their world better than I had otherwise, but I tiptoed away from it. It wasn't a world I wanted to enter.