Facebook for a New Age

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
by SamanthaK11

“1 friend request” says the little notice at the top right hand side of your Facebook home page. You click on it and the next thing you know your own mother has created her own Facebook and friend requested you. Do you accept? Do you deny? Or do you ignore it and hope it goes away? Recently more and more people have been joining the popular networking site known as Facebook.

Facebook is the world’s newest growing Internet phenomenon. If you were to look around a computer lab at a school, chances are that most kids, despite the rules, would be on facebook. It’s a way for kids to keep in touch, post pictures and videos, write notes about whatever is on their mind. The site is an addiction that has captured most of the youth community, and is expanding rapidly.
The website started out by targeting just college students, requiring a college e-mail as a login username and only allowing those students whose college had a specific network. From there, Facebook began to spread to all the colleges around the nation it began to open itself to high school students as well. Once the site was open to both high school and college students was when Facebook took off. At first it was easiest for private high school students to create a profile because like college students, they had school e-mails mirroring college students’. Public schools soon broke into the networking system as well. Then, the next thing everyone knew, middle school students began to shy away from the popular MySpace site to the more secure Facebook site. When middle school student began joining Facebook was when the site became open to all networks, including business and geographic. With such a wide networking system that allowed many different people from all over the world and of various ages to join, the site became larger than MySpace and the fastest growing website to date.

The growing numbers of facebook users are not student like many would believe. The large numbers of people that site has taken in is n great contribution to mother’s creating pages. According to the inside facebook and an article written women over the age of 55 have started to overtake facebook. Staggering numbers of more than 717,000 women over the age 55 have created facebook pages and are actively using them. The astonishing number of mothers on facebook brings up the question of their children’s reaction to their mothers having pages and “friending” them.

For the most part, children’s opinions are divided on the idea of their mothers having a facebook. Many don’t mind being friends with their mothers while others find it more mortifying. Most believe that their facebook pages are open and find that their mother on facebook doesn’t bother them. In fact a small amount feel that their mother’s are some what “cool” being so up on technology. On the other hand, others feel that the once teenager ruled website now being filled with adults is violating privacy. Many teenagers, especially girls, found that facebook was a place to escape from their parents thus having a place all to themselves. However, at the same time, those girls are also considered to be ones with something to hide.

From the adult perspective, many of the mothers have said that they are not on Facebook to spy on their children necessarily (however, that can be an added bonus). Their primary purpose is to reconnect with people from their high school or college years as well as their friends from work or other experiences. In essence they are on Facebook for the same reasons many students are. Facebook, is, just as the tagline says, a place that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” No matter the age or the purpose.

Photo Credit: pshab

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