Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Could the mixing of generations be a problem for Facebook?

With great interest I read the BBC news article about Facebook's 10th birthday. Of particular interest to me was this sentence: "Parents can be embarrassing on Facebook - they post pictures of their offspring that they find hilarious but their children don't, they add ill-advised comments to their children's status updates and they often fail to understand the basic etiquettes of online discourse."

During my research I found that there was a benefit at aiming towards transgenerational (i.e. acting across multiple generations) use of online social media. This article, I suspect, assumes the middle age parent and teenager relationship, but I wonder if it also holds true for the older parent and adult child relationship. 

My own mother is still not online, but my mother-in-law is, although not on Facebook. In so far, my husband and I are protected from any of these embarrassing moments of too much information sharing on Facebook.

I have a friend in her 30s and her mum is in her 50s and I’m able to see their activities on Facebook. To me their online exchange seems happy and full of banter and I hope it stays that way for the next 30 or more years.


Read full BBC article here


 

No comments: