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Wired News tries to put the current, increasingly hysterical backlash against MySpace in an historical context.

There's a sense of déjà vu surrounding the MySpace furor. Parents in the 1950s were horrified to discover that the comic books their children were reading contained violent and sometimes gruesome cartoon imagery, leading to congressional hearings and the formation of an industry "comic book code" that held titles to wholesome standards.

In the 1980s, parents opened their kids' bedroom doors and were buffeted by heavy metal music, leading to another round of panic and "Parental Advisory" labels on albums. In the '90s, it was rap. In the wake of the Columbine massacre, wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt to school could be grounds for suspension.

This time, though, the target of the crackdown is content created by teens and not just consumed by them.

The very design of a teenager's MySpace page can be shocking to adult eyes. A highly customizable amalgam of blogging, music sharing and social-discovery services, a typical page is a near perfect reflection of the chaos and passion of youth: a music-filled space, rudely splattered with photos and covered in barely-legible prose rendered in font colors that blend together and fade into the background.

UC Berkeley's Danah Boyd is among the experts quoted, arguing "persuasively that MySpace is serving an important role for teens who need to interact with one another away from adults as part of the normal socialization process." Check out her recent lecture on the issue for more details.

On a related note, ABC News recently reported on a Jupiter Research analyst's calling into question whether MySpace really has the tens of millions of users it claims. Basically, the question is how many of the people who register at MySpace ever return at all, let alone become active, recurring users.