“Making Space” (Jewish Week–First Person Singular)
by Esther D. Kustanowitz

Many of today’s college and post-college-age young adults are involved in an online community called MySpace. When you register, you are given a homepage, which you decorate yourself: You design it, decide what biographical information to include in the profile, what kind of music or video will greet page visitors and put up as many pictures of yourself or other people in your life as you want. And although you can invite other people into your network, it’s still not called “OurSpace” — you choose your affiliations, but ultimately the profile belongs solely and completely to one individual: you.

In some ways, MySpace inherits a solid literary legacy, with subtle flavors of both Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” and Emily Dickinson’s soul that “selects its own society.” The message of both concepts is that to find yourself — whether it’s your truth or your art — you have to experience solitude. To exist in a place apart from others enables you to define yourself in a relative vacuum instead of in a biased social or familial context. And so, online communities provide young adults with room to be and breathe in an environment of their own creation.

To continue reading the article, click here.