CBS: 29.000 Predators on MySpace

The Internet gives the citizen possibilities for surveillance. Citizens use these possibilities when they think vertical surveillance fails. Especially children are put into discourses of surveillance as if they are members of a vulnerable group, not watched over by the state. They are (passive) preys who will be detected by pedophiles as practising predators in public and virtual spaces. Websites with details of pedophiles ‘in your neighbourhoud’ appear when citizens are concerned with child safety. In the social networking site environment of MySpace, these child preys are addressed and explained how they can protect themselves against the possible predators. But in television shows, on their website and even with a technology consultant television network (and concurrent of MySpace owner Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) CBS addresses the parents of the preys and attacks MySpace. In the CBS discourse, children are vulnerable and 29.000 predators will do bad things with their preys. Children are made to an object of vulnerability and MySpace and only MySpace is bad for them!

Read the paper (in Dutch) I made for the ‘TV as Governmental Technology’ course.