USA TODAY でアメリカをよむコミュの USA Today's Today News10/7

＊ミキシーやめたら社会的な自殺？

Some youth rethink online communications

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-06-facing-the-faceless_x.htm

CHICAGO — For some, it would be unthinkable — certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account.

MySpace をやめることは社会的な自殺に等しい

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos — all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

"The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt," Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. "It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails."

Gabe Henderson はネットなどの表面的なつきあいに疑問を持つようになってきた。

もちろんこうした人は圧倒的に少数で

Of course, these forms of communication continue to dominate. In the October issue of the journal Pediatrics, for instance, researchers at Stanford University released findings from an ongoing study of students at an upper-middle income high school in the San Francisco area. One written survey found that the large majority of students were members of at least one social networking site — 81% of them on MySpace. They also found that 89% of those students had cellphones, most of them with text and Web surfing capabilities.

ある高校では81%の学生がMySpaceにアカウントを持っていると
いう調査もある。