Wrong kind of support

Depending on a user's intent, MySpace is "as wholesome as cheerleading and baseball, or as troubling as guns, sex and drugs," reports ABC's Primetime. It zooms in on 12-year-old Sarah, a middle school student in the Midwest, who was "desperate to belong, trying to cope with the typical insecurities and growing pains that come with being a preteen." She told Primetime she was friendless and wanted to be like the stoned kid in the back of the bus who didn’t even care about what was going on around him. So she went online and "found plenty of outsiders like herself." She had "started experimenting with drugs before joining MySpace but getting online created a whole new world of possibilities. A simple search by ABC News on MySpace came up with tens of thousands of people talking about marijuana. Many more were in groups where sex was the topic, and nearly 55,000 people belonged to an online group called Drunks United." But this is not new to the Web - for years, bulimics and anorexics have found "support" in "pro-mia" and "pro-ana" community sites (see this New York Times article of 9/02). In fact, the sheer visibility of Web 2.0's version of socializing (and the way social-networking sites aggregate like-minded people so visibly) maybe actually help bring these communities out in the open more.