Let's Face It

Let's face it...

There is no denying the popularity and strength of social networking sites. Facebook has 250 million members worldwide, of whom 120 million log in at least once a day. The latest craze, Twitter, is a phenomenal success story, which has grown from about half a million users in January 2008 to over 12 million today....

These numbers are certainly impressive, but while once sites like Facebook and Myspace were considered teenage or university students' websites, in the last few months there has been a staggering increase in the number of parents joining Facebook, with the number in the 30-54 age increasing by 35% in the last year. Meanwhile, according to official statistics, the number of school children leaving Facebook has grown by 20%.which now means the 30-54 age group is the most popular age group on the site. Let's face it, the moment you get your aunt "poking" you, or your mum reading your comments to try to find out what you got up to at your friend's birthday party, any credibility these sites have is over.

Perhaps we parents had mixed feelings of fear and jealousy over our children's time on the internet. We've all heard of horror stories of a poor unsuspecting girl being groomed and abducted by some pervert on one of these sites or of kids being bullied. We also all have a certain curiosity as to what our kids are really up to. So we join Myspace or Facebook, and it turns out we rather like it. We tell our friends, who also join, and before you know it the whole family has joined and everyone wonders how they got on without it.

Meanwhile, the teenagers and young children who first joined abandon it as soon as dad comments "don't forget mum's birthday next week" on their page. In July this year a 15 year old London school boy on a work placement at Morgan Stanley stunned the management of these sites by claiming nobody his age uses social networking sites. Twitter was far too expensive, as his friends had to pay for a text to go to a website which nobody reads, and the social networking side of Facebook was of no interest to a group of school children. A recent focus group (twenty set) found teenagers were simply bored of Facebook, and the majority never update their status ("Only if I'm, like, really bored" according to one), and use texts and e-mails to communicate with their friends. Myspace was yesterday's news, and is only used to look at their favourite band's Myspace pages. So where are they? Twenty set found they use Youtube to share funny videos, and fmylife.com to share comic antidotes.

As for us parents, it was bad enough when our boss joined Facebook, but now well we might soon be joining our kids in deserting these sites, for according to US technology website ReadWriteWeb "high schoolers are fleeing Facebook and grandparents are taking over!". Gasp! Do we really want our own parents reading about our private life?

Words for Winter 2009 issue by local dad and journalist Stephen Maughan (who quit Facebook in August)