Deaths bring focus on to online life
Fri 15 June 2007
Jane Fynes-Clinton, Journalism
The suicides of two teenage friends in Victoria, Australia have had a ripple effect through counselling, parent and school circles.
But in addition to prompting discussion about suicide and depression, the deaths also turned the spotlight on the huge number of hours youths spend on the friend and music networking site, MySpace.
The girls, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, both aged 16, of Belgrave, Victoria, appear to have made the suicide pact long before the day they hanged themselves in the Dandenong Ranges near their homes.
On her MySpace page, Ms Gater had written "let Steph and me b free" and, in a posting to her boyfriend just after Christmas, she wrote "I would kill myself before I would wait all that long day. Then I won't feel that feeling and I won't ask myself how will I die? Who will kill me? I love you Allan", the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
While MySpace and its popularity among young people are a focus in the aftermath of the girls’ deaths, parental calls for more stringent age controls and filters to be applied to the website have gathered limited support.
Prime Minister John Howard encouraged parents to be vigilant, but did not demand age restrictions or laws on internet declarations. Mr Howard said imposing laws could violate freedom of speech. 
"I think the greatest thing that has to be said about this is that parental responsibility in the end is the key to behaviour by children," he told ABC radio.
"Government can't educate parents to be responsible if they don't have an instinct for responsibility. And whilst there are things the government can do, there is a limit before you start running up against freedom of speech."
Psychologist and author Michael Carr-Gregg, who is based in Melbourne, Victoria, told The Courier-Mail he recommended parents monitored and limited their children's internet usage.
"If the parents of these girls had been monitoring their MySpace, alarm bells would have rung," Dr Carr-Gregg said.
"Parents need to take a hell of a lot more interest in what their kids do online, not just what they download but also what they upload."
Dr Carr-Gregg advised parents to use software programs that record what their children write on the internet, including MySpace, and recommended limits on internet time.
MySpace – which has been analysed and criticised since the deaths – had humble beginnings and a meteoric rise in popularity.
An article on the Consumer Affairs website under the headline What's Inside MySpace.com said MySpace was started as a reaction to the tech bubble bursting in 2001.
Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson spoke of the explosion of MySpace popularity in Fortune Magazine last year. Mr Anderson is MySpace’s current president and Mr DeWolfe its CEO. The Fortune article said MySpace – regularly in the top 10 most popular internet sites – included pages for 2.2 million bands, 8000 comedians and 100 million everyday people. On a typical day, it signed up 230,000 new users. And it is still growing.
University of California Professor of Psychology Larry Rosen released the results of two studies on adolescents’ use of MySpace in June last year.
His report, Adolescents in MySpace: Identity Formation, Friendship and Sexual Predators found that having more contacts on MySpace was directly linked to greater internet addiction, less shyness, more creativity, more honesty online and more time spent with their friends on MySpace.
But of the young people surveyed, 20 per cent felt that MySpace has negatively affected their schoolwork, job performance and relationships with family and friends.
Dr Rosen also surveyed the teens’ parents and found that 38 per cent had not seen their teenager’s MySpace page.
Just over 40 per cent of parents were unsure how many days per week their teenagers were on MySpace and 36 per cent were unsure how many hours a day they were on MySpace, he found.
Less than half of the parents said they limited their teenager’s MySpace time, but teenagers said the limits were not followed.
"Overall, the results indicate that while MySpace may have some negative aspects, it can
provide a forum for teenagers to develop a sense of their personal identity through communication with friends and strangers," Dr Rosen said in his report.
"The major issue that arose from these interviews is that parents simply ignore their children’s activities on MySpace.
"… The bottom line is that MySpace is not inherently scary or dangerous. In fact, it is helping teens develop an all-important sense of their identity."
There is little evidence that the Victorian girls’ death is part of a broader depressive pattern among MySpace users.
Teenage girl suicides, whether or not the internet is used as an indicator or pathway, are relatively rare. The most recent figures available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that 24 girls between 15 and 19 years killed themselves in Australia in 2005.
Patrick McGorry, a professor of youth mental health at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Jo Robinson, the co-ordinator of suicide prevention research at ORYGEN Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, wrote in The Age they believed the internet, and places on it that young people expressed themselves, may even prevent suicide.
"… In parallel with its rise in influence, we have seen a modest decline in rates of suicide in young people," Professor McGorry and Ms Robinson said.
"This argues against the view of the internet as a risk factor.
"MSN and MySpace are used by young people to strengthen and extend their social bonds and peer relationships in the real world."
Professor McGorry and Ms Robinson said connecting with other users online added a dimension to a young person’s sociability.
"Personal websites, youth-oriented internet sites and text messaging are likely to be a protective factor in suicide risk by providing a kind of electronic safety net," they said.
A PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley and a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Centre for Communications Danah Boyd is researching how youth present themselves and engage with the public through MySpace.
She told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference last year that the moral panic about MySpace and the risks it presented to young people had been overblown.
"The risks are not why youth are flocking to the site. To them, the benefits for socialisation outweigh the potential harm," Ms Boyd said.
Ms Boyd said that the increasing popularity of MySpace was directly related to teens’ diminishing access to public space. 
"Classic 1950s hang-out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents," she said.
"Hanging out around the neighbourhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors.
"Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends' homes when their parents are present."
Ms Boyd said digital technologies let young people socialise on sites like MySpace while physically remaining in a space their parents had control over.
"What we're seeing right now is a cultural shift due to the introduction of a new medium and the emergence of greater restrictions on youth mobility and access," Ms Boyd said. "The long-term implications of this are unclear.
"Regardless of what will come, youth are doing what they've always done – repurposing new mediums in order to learn about social culture."
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