To Lurk Or Not To Lurk : from July 31, 2006

Ok, I admit it, I am a lurker. Not by the classical definition of the word:

LURK

v 1: lie in wait, lie in ambush, behave in a sneaky and secretive manner [syn: skulk] 2: be about; "The high school students like to loiter in the Central Square"; "Who is this man that is hanging around the department?" [syn: loiter, lounge, footle, lollygag, loaf, lallygag, hang around, mess about, tarry, linger, mill about, mill around] 3: wait in hiding to attack [syn: ambush, scupper, bushwhack, waylay, ambuscade, lie in wait]

but by the post MySpace definition of one who looks at profiles without commenting.

I further admit that the profiles that I lurk are mostly the young people my children are friends with. I am pleased when I see a youngster who has set their profile to private. Not that those who choose to leave their profiles public are universally making a poor choice. Many or most of these public profiles are benign. Why they choose to leave what amounts to a recorded log of private conversations, images and personnel journal entry’s open for any random person to read struck me as decidedly odd until I started reading up on the adolescent mind set. The short explanation is as simple as the classic bumper sticker:

“Hire a teenager while they still know everything.”

The not so short explanation is that until age 17 or so teen’s brains are undergoing a radical rewiring that began at around 12. If one believes in a psychological view of the universe you can think of this rewiring period as the pre-adult shake down of the Ego and Id. This brain growth can engender any number of outward manifestations. The sulking, woe is me, down trodden, teen, the hyper, always on always going teen…the combinations are endless and they all go back to one core teen experience, i.e. learning to live within and cope with a world where they are not the center of all things. I was talking to one of my kids friends and they mentioned their MySpace page, I told them I’d seen it an I liked their photo on their profile. They could not understand how I could have seen their page. I explained to them that their page was not set to private and if I wanted to I could read their blog postings, surf through their friends list and read all their comments.

After a couple of minutes I was told:

“No offence or anything, but I really don’t want adults reading my page.”

I had to explain that the Internet is open to the public, 24/7, year round to anyone with access to computer, that the only way to pick and choose who looks at their page is to switch it to private. Which, for some reason, is perceived as being a real un-cool drag.

What I realized is that this generation of young people has never known a world without an Internet so, they have no frame of reference to understand the significance of its existence. For them it is no different than turning on the tap and getting hot water, or turning on the TV and getting 200 things to watch. This is what the creators of MySpace have tapped into, a “me” generation that makes those old fogies from the 1970’s look like rank amateurs.

The news is littered with accounts of kids being lurked in the classic definition of the term, “wait in hiding to attack”, by all sorts of predators. While this sort of lurker is by far the most dangerous and the most alarming to parents. Another type of lurking can be found if you look for a little while, namely, kids lurking kids. In many respects the friends list on any given kids MySpace is as or more telling than what group of kids they sit with at lunch. The same cliques, jocks, nerds, misfits, popular, et al, exist in the web world. Like a multi paged jig saw puzzle these pages often hold out of context pieces of a larger story or, in many cases, drama. I lurk random profiles within a 5 or 10-mile radius of my zip code too. In an age where one might only learn the name of a neighbor after living on the same street for a decade you can learn more about the folks on the other side of the fence or green belt than you might expect. I browse friend lists and click through profile after profile. I am routinely astonished by how closely the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game mirrors the interlinking “friends” of the MySpace user.

Earlier this year MySpace was acquired by for 580 million dollars ($550 million more than the next highest offer) by News Corp. News Corp says it will be working on how to market their news, media and commercial advertising offerings directly to each and every MySpace user. You can bet the early research groups will be lurking our kids pages heavily. Lurking their groups and forums. Pushing the videos, music and media that News Corp will profit from the most. How long will it be ‘till a friends :”Thanks for the coffee” comment triggers a search engine hit to the word “coffee” and sends a “ add friend” request with a printable coupon attached from McDonalds? Not much longer is my guess.

So for now I will keep on lurking Myspace like some sort of cyber version Boo Radley.