My Mom is On Facebook

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

When the Christian Science Monitor dropped its time old tradition of being published on paper and the New York Times mortgaged its skyscraper a few months ago I thought to myself, “wow, things are really changing.”

When a month ago my 59 year old mother told me, “So, I saw that Liam grew a beard on Facebook today,” I raised my eyebrows and said this time - not thought – “wow, things have changed!”

I joined Facebook five years ago at a time when the site wouldn’t let me be friends with anyone other than students at my college. I remember when Facebook gradually opened itself up and it first linked to other colleges, then it included high schools, and then I remember when Facebook just opened itself to the world. But really, my mom on Facebook?

Today, she’s writing on the wall of my best friends that are on the other side of the country, telling them that Mom #2 hopes they are doing well and that they need to shave.

“Dude, I think your entire family has written on my wall,” Liam told me after first my sisters (both in their mid to late 20’s) and then finally my mother sent him messages.

“No, I’m not going to be your mom’s friend! What happens if someone tags a picture of me that I don’t want her to see!” said my girlfriend. She’s made it a rule not to be friends with any parents of people she knows.

The point of this family/friend narrative is that it merges exactly with a research report that InsideFacebook.com published this month (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing-demographic-on-facebook-women-over-55/) . I knew that the demographics of Facebook had been shifting drastically over the last few years, but I didn’t expect for my 59 year old mother to be part of the fastest growing demographic on the site right now - women over the age of 55. I laughed when I saw the report and immediately passed it on to my mother. It turns out that over the last four months, AARP eligible women boosted their presence on Facebook by 175.3%.

The breakdown of the demographics is pretty interesting. For instance, 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now over the age of 26. That seemed unimaginable only a year ago and in fact it was impossible a few years ago when only people with .edu email addresses could join. More facts are available at the site, and I’m sure they’ll be even more shocking in four more months.

So, after an amused phone call between my sisters about how hip my mother now was, I pried a little bit and got my mom to answer some questions for me about her experiences on Facebook (she and I chatted over her last internet leap - AOL Instant Messenger) and she old me some interesting things:

1. She checks Facebook “at least daily”
2. She’d be interested in getting information/following a cause or product she was interested in on Facebook
3. She thinks that more of her generation is going to be joining Facebook
4. She’s a member of several groups
5. She filled out the annoying “25 things you didn’t know about__” phenomenon
6. The juiciest thing that she’s learned so far came from “pictures of an old boyfriends wife - she looks OLD - yippee!”

I guess that it’s a classic case of “you never really understand until it happens to someone you know.” The digital exclusiveness that I once had to myself and those my age or younger is eroding faster than I ever could have imagined. Now even older generations are embracing web 2.0 and are getting just as addicted as the sneaky interns of the world are.