Conventional wisdom has it that teenagers don’t use Facebook because their parents are watching online.
Preliminary findings of a study of social media, for example, suggest young people can’t “be free” if they know their parents may learn of “every indiscretion”.
Do we really need research to tell us that?
Teenagers obviously don’t want their parents to know they partied and smoked pot instead of studying. They could get in trouble.
Or worse, be forced to share their drug connection.
If I were a father, my adolescent children need not worry.
There isn’t anything a teenager could post on Facebook that I would find remotely interesting.
I wouldn’t say that, not in so many words. This is a kind of birds and bees conversation requiring wisdom and finesse.
So, I’d simply tell my children that I would sooner down a bottle of bleach than to follow the ignorant, hormone-soaked brain farts of your everyday, zit-faced bobby soxer.
It isn’t personal. I love puppies. But you don’t see me patting them on the head when they hump my leg.
And that is far less disgusting than teenagers.
I will not allow updates regarding alcohol binging or unwanted pregnancies to ruin my newsfeed.
Especially not from my own children.
Very few people under age 35 have anything worth sharing on Facebook.
And the numbers don’t get much better at 35 and up.
So, to little Shlomo Junior, and my dear Jacquette, I would say this: your Facebook feed will be blocked until you develop a personality.
Sadly, that is one conversation I will never have, I’m afraid.
Not now, after Jacquie and I received news about our fertility.
A specialist recently told us in no uncertain terms that we cannot have children.
She said we have too much cool, expensive shit in our home, and we can’t have children around fucking it all up.
I can imaging many teenagers have secrets they can’t afford to reveal.
But that’s not the main reason they’re leaving Facebook.
It’s because they don’t want to be seen in that sphere with their grandmother.
The grandmother doesn’t know what the fuck is going on in Facebook.
She has spent most of her life in the real world, and now she has arrived in this virtual reality, and her interaction with it is indistinguishable from her smashing her face into the keyboard and pressing ‘Enter’.
She means well. But she is just not accustomed to the mores and nuances of social media etiquette.
Somebody I know has a nonagenarian relative who recently started using the Internet.
It didn’t take long for the old fella’s curiosity to lead to the web’s many splendored “Red Light District”.
This would not have come to the friend’s attention if not for the elder’s obliviousness to the long, dirty trail of popup window ads that are the bane of the pornography-consuming public.
Which seems to me the same as leafing through the Penthouse magazine you’re waiting to buy at a busy corner store. That is not the level of sharing anyone wants. Even stupid teenagers know that.
Basement Life 