The struggle to deal with natural human curiosity is especially difficult during the teenage and young adult world. Gossip is created in the teenage world as a way to move away from frivolous curiosity of childhood, to the more personal curiosity of adulthood. People of this age are still getting used to the desire to learn about other's lives, while trying to protect their own new-found need for privacy. The addition of the online medium for communication only complicates things further for people of this age. A girl will leave someone else’s boyfriend a suggestive comment and you can be sure people will be talking about it five minutes later. People have also been known to post blogs spreading rumors or trash talking their peers. It makes it possible to instantly spread information to everyone you know, which can be a big problem on both sides of the gossip depending on the content and how it is portrayed. MySpace has allowed the very serious reality of adolescent social issues and struggles to blend with the virtual reality of the Internet – a combination that can prove to be very damaging.
Inevitably, every teenager’s life is affected by, and sometimes controlled by, gossip and conflict with peers. MySpace shows how our society has become extremely technologically based because it has given the opportunity for a whole new realm of adolescent conflict to occur, and has even acquired its own phrase – “MySpace drama”. It used to be that teenagers would obtain their source of gossip through telephone calls after school, notes passed during class, and whispers within tight circles in the halls and at lunch. The same now happens on MySpace, by looking through people’s comments to each other, blogs they have posted, and of course the new weapon – “the top 8”. This form of communication can be impersonal and is very open to the possibility of misinterpretation and confusion when the real world collides with the virtual, online world of MySpace. Since everything is typed, and read from a screen, it is possible to take something someone has said the wrong way, or interpret something that someone has said to someone else falsely. Problems also arise due to the fact that MySpace profiles are not always a direct, true representation of the member but they also have a real life identity and interact with others in reality. Someone may say something or portray themselves in a somewhat false light on MySpace, but when they go to school, their classmates know the real them, and confusion and conflict can occur as a result. The lines between reality and the online world are becoming blurred, and many times it is still difficult to deal with and understand the blending, sometimes causing negative reactions.