Behind the Headlines

Over the weekend, I logged onto MySpace to check it out since I hadn’t been there in awhile. Oy.

What I found still has me a little shocked. Not the content and the solicitation and so on and so forth – I’ve been one of the defenders of social sites like MySpace for awhile now because they’re only as dangerous as you let them be. But because I found out that one of my cousins is pregnant. Not just a little pregnant, but giving birth in less than three months, the baby already has a name and they know his gender pregnant. Through a series of random events and clicks I found this out.

My first thought: Is this for real? What a weird joke. Nope. It’s real; it has to be.

Second thought: “Mom, did you know about this?” Yeah, she says, I just found out and forgot to tell you. No one really knew until last week.

I’ve heard of people finding out they were no longer dating because their person had changed their profile to “single”, but this was a little different. People have been scraping out of break ups for forever, but a pregnancy those involved are happy about?

Wow. MySpace as the messenger. I’m not sure I really like that, but I suppose it’s better than not knowing. I guess it just shows the pervasiveness of the Internet, and networks like this, in passing on news that was once considered personal and merited at least a phone call.