Apr

13

Growing Up with Facebook, Part 1

Filed Under Social Networking 

I’d like to pass on some things that have crossed my mind since I’ve gotten into . The more I thought about it, the more I wrote, so I’ve decided to break this up into two different posts. This is the first one, and it basically lays out a framework for the points I want to make later on.

Like most people, I’ve been adding new friends/ people from the past, people from college and high school. I’ve been looking at their faces, their profiles, and wondering what I would say to them after so many years have passed.

The main thing is that by engaging my memories about them, and what they meant to me — it all just reminds me of how much I’ve grown since then. I mean, we’re talking 30 years since high school and 25 years since college.

I got friends out there who are now grandparents, and interestingly — most of them, when I look at their profiles, have anywhere from a few to maybe a dozen so-called “friends.” Then, of course, there are the youngsters that I know also, nephews and nieces, people like that (they’re “20 something”), and I’ve noticed that a lot of them have anywhere from 200 to 300 friends!! Of course, they’re in college and they’re attacking it like any other fad.

For them, it’s cool to have a Facebook presence and to join hundreds of arcane Facebook “groups,” so their numbers will naturally soar as a result of their being involved with one another, in college, and let’s face it, Facebook’s only been around since 2004.

In other words, we didn’t have social networking sites like Facebook when I was coming up.

” . . . when I left the all-black east-side of Cleveland to attend an all-white prep school (St. John’s Prep. in Collegeville, MN) in 1969, had just been shot the previous summer, and race relations were very difficult to say the least.”

- Steve Maclin

When I graduated from (Northfield, MN) in ‘76, our school had just snapped up its first computer. It was not exactly the “talk of the campus” (it was more of an “interesting oddity” at that time); it filled up a whole room that was always refrigerated, and no one that I knew had ever actually “seen it.” Still, it was apparently memorable.

Guess that goes to show just how much things have changed in a relatively short amount time.

What’s worth teasing out, is the idea that I grew up knowing that the “school trip” (i.e., the whole “going away to / college experience”) involved getting to know someone for a couple or few years, and eventually, splitting up and going your separate ways — knowing that you’d probably never see each other again for the rest of your lives! Heck, I finished college, grad school, my doctorate and taught for 10 years and, for the most part, things were still like that! We didn’t make associations that were “that close” because we knew, in the back of our minds, that pretty soon, we’d have to split up. There were no “best friends forever” (); in fact, nothing was “forever.”

I mean, that’s the way things were, we all knew it, and though we didn’t exactly like it, we accepted it and worked around it — by putting more into the time we had together.

Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, most either own or have access to computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using and other social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will.

So, I ask myself: what are they going to be like when they get to be grandparents??

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