I am very blessed with three odd little packages the Lord sent to my wife and I which society labels our “children”. The oldest, Jon, is about to turn 22 and was a very social, computer literate teen ager when the My Space revolution took place. My Space was an awesome social networking site which allowed teen to post pics, send messages, create a personae with music on line and generally network. Jon was kind enough to educate me regarding social networking at great peril to himself.
MySpace had some problems. It was slow. Logging on to someone’s page you were bombarded by their music. It offered a lot of options for wallpaper which visually cluttered the images...and it was as I said...slow (mainly because all of the crap listed above). Facebook was only available for college students but in Jon’s senior year in high school it became available to anyone who had an .edu email address and then quickly opened up to everyone.
I doggedly hung on to My Space but as the people I wanted to come into contact were on My Space less and less i finally had to abandon it. My old MySpace page is still up but lies like a grave, unvisited, unkept and pretty much forgotten. The only reason i log onto MySpace now is to visit various band web sites where it still is a superior place to sample music. Facebook offered few options, a clean and uniform presentation and it was fast and I was hooked.
Why would I be interested in being on Facebook or MySpace anyway? I was in my early 40’s and these social web sites were dominated by college and high school students. Well that is complicated. One was that realized it was a way to unobtrusively have some idea of my sons life and his friends life. Early and (and sometimes still) people post things and even though they know it is out there for the public, it feels private and without consequences. If one of my son’s friends posted pictures of drinking, or made a lot of drug references in his or her post this was “information”. to help my parenting (My obligation towards that kid’s parents is something that should probably be taken up later). Also, through my church and through Camp Arcadia I had a lot of kids in that age group I wanted to keep in touch with and as it turns out try and encourage. I am a communicator and words mean a lot to me and this medium made sense to me.
Being on Facebook in no way made me hip, cool or even interesting to most of these kids. I was an anomaly at the time and I needed to take great steps (which I am certain I screwed up) to not be creepy, middle aged, Stalker guy. It was fun keeping up with these people in a way that they understood.
Recently more and more adults have been logging on and tuning in. I do not know how I really feel about this because i viewed it as something that belonged to “the kids” where a few people my age were getting on board. Now the adults are taking over and the rules will change but it does some good to visit the evolution of Face Book. What I want to do in this occasional series of posts is to provide some observations and tips into this evolving media.
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