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
