It's spawned a thousand stories about old people gatecrashing into a world of young people ever since it opened its registration and doubled its users to 24 million. Fifty-something Emily Yoffe of Slate.com did this piece back on March 8 about not finding any friends her own age on Facebook.
"Scrolling around the photos of all these creamy young people, I felt as if I should be wearing an ankle bracelet that sent signals to my parole officer. I also found all my high-school- and college-age nieces and nephews, but I knew they'd be as thrilled to receive my friend request as they would to have me show up at one of their mixers (do they still have mixers?)," Yoffe wrote.
Then she did this follow-up gloat a week later when a gazillion people friended her out of pity.
"Plowing through the 775 requests made fresh the banal observation that young people are good-looking. (This was underlined when my husband would come into my office and, standing over my shoulder, say, "Click on her!") Their freshness made me want to protect them. I felt like Holden Caulfield when he imagined children playing in a field of rye: 'What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.' I wanted to catch these students and say, 'Don't let a drunk friend drive you home! Be careful who you marry! Take the obscenities off your Facebook profile!'," Yoffe wrote.
Three months later, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote a pale imitation of Emily Yoffe's column. He didn't seem to share her enthusiasm for online networks.
"I'm still puzzled by this mysterious process in which some people invite you to become friends (meaning you can see their home pages, photos and compilation of friends) while others blow you off. Some 20-somethings "friended" me out of the blue but never sent me any messages or replied to mine. It almost seems like the point is to collect a long list of names rather than establish relationships outside your immediate circle," Kurtz wrote, scratching his head.
Clearly, he was missing the point. Yoffe's obvious enjoyment of Facebook's young people won over many more friends than Kurtz's grumpy I'm-too-old-for-this-anyway act -- she had 1055 friends as of 9.17 pm on June 13, while Kurtz...had 217.
Not that Facebook is a popularity contest. My point is only this. If you are older than your early twenties, the significance of Facebook to your life is directly proportional to two things: one, the openness with which you approach the obvious age gap between you and other Facebookers, and two, the enthusiasm with which you invite people you already know to join you online.
This was so exquisitely illustrated by a June 7 New York Times article that I promptly posted the entire story as a note on my Facebook profile with a single "Ahem."
Michelle Slatalla's piece -- 'omg my mom joined facebook!!' -- perfectly captured the self-doubt and sheepish pleasure of all Facebook members older than 21. It stayed on the most-emailed list of NYT articles for days past its publication.
Slatalla joined Facebook in part to get back at a snarky teenage daughter. She added her daughter's friends to her list and then invited her own to join Facebook. She poked someone here, wrote on a wall there, and started having fun.
Then she called an assistant professor of cultural anthropology to ask what it all meant. He told her to grow up.
"But although he didn’t go so far as to say he disapproved of my parenting skills, Professor Wesch reminded me that what Facebook’s younger users really are doing is exploring their identities, which they may not want to parade in front of their parents.
'Can’t I explore my identity, too?' I asked. 'Why does everything fun have to be for them?'
He pointed out that there are a number of other social networks — sober, grown-up places like Linkedin.com (for making business contacts) and Care2.com (for social activists) and Webbiographies.com (for amateur genealogists) — where I could cavort without offending my daughter.
'There is a really good social network for older people, too,' Professor Wesch said. 'It caters to the older generation with an automatic feed of news that relates to older generations and a number of features tailored to the way people in that generation would interact.'
'What’s it called? I asked.
'I can’t remember the name of it,' he said.
'Exactly,' I said. 'I’m staying where it’s fun.'"
As for me, I joined Facebook a few weeks ago at the invitation of a former coworker in Dubai. Upon my arrival into this brave new world, I found five other invitations already waiting for me from other friends, like spirits in a fourth dimension which I hadn't seen until now, and to which I didn't know I belonged.
Now nearly all my Facebook friends represent friendships plucked and gathered across the continents and the years.
Before this, I belonged to a Google-owned networking site called Orkut, a bug-ridden clunker that could never match Facebook's streamlined functionality. And its outreach seemed limited to users of international origin: while I found lots of my Pakistani friends on there, I never spotted any Americans.
With Facebook, I've found lost-long high school classmates from California and first cousins from Karachi. I've found acquaintances in Boston I wanted to get to know better and old friends in London with whom I'd lost touch.
It's helped me pull together strands of all the different social webs in my life and weave them safely into a neat little profile page. It's going to be hard to lose touch now.
Unlike Kurtz or even Yoffe, I don't collect names of people I don't know but cherish connecting to the ones I already do.
Thankfully, I don't, like Slatalla, have a 16-year-old who tells me "everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks."
But I was a middle school teacher once, and Facebook is rife with my former students. Even among 24 million profiles, theirs pop up in mutual Pakistani circles.
A bit queasy about it at first, I now enjoy looking at my students' profiles and marvelling at their development into poised young adults. I don't initiate friend invitations but accept theirs if they come my way. It's my way of making peace with the generation gap in Facebook.
And the kids don't seem to mind. I got a cheerful note scrawled on my wall soon after I joined.
"Oh wow, HELLO! =) Been so long. How've you been miss?!"
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