Living All In

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week outlined online uber-community MySpace’s proposed efforts to appease those that see the site as a trolling ground for degenerates.  The now Fox/News Corp entity’s solution?  Offer free spyware for parents to install on their home computers that logs when anyone signs on to the site and the profile name and age registered.  Content posted and viewed is not recorded.

The twist here with this spyware is that the MySpace user is notified when logging on that their information is being recorded.  So it’s spying with notification.

I understand the concern with keeping kids safe (you are required to be at least 14 to use the site) but MySpace would have been wiser to secretly contracted with a third party to develop and distribute the app instead of an ‘official’ MySpace spyware program.  Why?  Teens want privacy and independence.  Once MySpace ‘cozys up’ to parents, the start up, organic, ‘we make it - we own it’ feel will be gone, and teens with it flocking to the next recently discovered haven for mostly unfiltered conversation and independence.

The major underestimation here by MySpace (and typical of parents missing the motivations of the teenage mind) is that teens can mentally process parents being concerned with their safety; they’re the gatekeepers of the teen’s freedom.  But most teens want an ally in their pursuit of more and more freedom.  MySpace was once viewed as that ally, but the site could soon be moving to the axis of oppression.  Strangely enough, I don’t think a coalition of 33 state attorney generals should change (by threat of force) an online corporation’s business model because parents are checked out of their teens lives.  There are already a number of third party solutions to monitor your children’s activity online.  Squeeze the freedoms of MySpace too tight and watch it’s young members scatter.

This has its parallels in publishing in the Young Adult category as well.  Often times Christian authors and publishers are so concerned with answering teens questions with such completeness and precision on the ‘right’ answer or where to surgically draw the line, the content, while true, has the impact and penetration of a marshmallow thrown against a brick wall.  It comes off as less than real to a teen and, without connecting with their daily reality, the advice seems a tad removed from true.  And at worst it’s viewed as parental propaganda.  That’s why in the world of ’secular’ publishing, Young Adult fiction is so huge and in the CBA, Christian fiction sells less than YA non-fiction, because ABA fiction sounds like their world around them while sugary sweet, no-question-left-unanswered Christian fiction and non-fiction sounds, well, ficticious.

So when a corporate giant says "your parents and I agree it’s for your safety" many (but not all) will start to cast their patently disloyal consumption habits onto the newest, coolest, undiscovered country, no matter how raw and inelegant. 

Because raw and inelegant is real.  And to teens, for better or worse, real is true.

Which leads me to article number two. 

In a highly ‘techie’ six page article in an online mag for the IT community, Baseline examines the MySpace phenomenon by tracking the behind-the-scenes technical challenges from growing from just Tom to 26 million users and beyond.  If you’re into the techie crack of discussion on scalable architecture and database flexibility, click on through.  But the best part of the article lay here,  on page four entitled "Web Experts Grade MySpace": 

MySpace.com’s continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It’s buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded "Unexpected Error" screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway.

MySpace succeeds because teens don’t want rigid standards when it comes to personal expression.  While they do want a guiding force and moral code in their lives with reasonable boundaries, adhering to things like CSS and HTML standards is inflexible, cooked, and lame.  And as we all know, cooked is the opposite of raw.  And what is raw?  That’s right, raw is real.  So the talk around ‘cleaning up’ the visual standards and tweakability of MySpace is just another potential example of some insular OCD techies not ‘getting’ the teenage mind.

Once again, I can’t help but see the parallels in Christian Young Adult publishing.  It took a long while to ‘train’ the freelance editor of our Hungry Planet YA books.   I can’t imagine how hard it is for an English major to tackle our manuscripts.  The formatting is raw.  The grammar is raw.  Things are dangling, hanging, you name it.  After three years she’s a mostly breeze to work with, though I imagine it’s tough for her to switch gears to our projects.  I don’t really know if she understands why we’re doing it or just merely resigned to our methods! 

My point is that there are plenty of books on the shelves of teen sections in Christian book stores with fabulous content and truth.  But much of it reads like it was put through a web CSS and HTML standards committee; inflexible, cooked, and lame.  In three words, opposite of real. 

In one, fake. 

And that’s the real disconnect for the English majors and publishing gatekeepers, how can God’s truth be fake?  But it’s not the truth that’s fake to this Generation Next, it’s the delivery.

I think we’ve done a pretty good job on jumping the fake chasm in non-fiction.  And we’re making plans to do the same in YA fiction.  As I’ve said before, stay tuned.  By the way, for those that want a Christian version of MySpace, check out shoutlife.com.  Personally and corporately, I feel there are more kids to help on MySpace, so we’ll be there until teens are driven out to their next promised land of independence and freedom. 

Because one adult’s land of ugly layouts and unanswered questions is just another teen’s land of milk and honey.