WHEN Amy Waldman first signed on to Facebook last year and started to send joking messages about good grammar back and forth with a new 18-year-old friend, Ms. Waldman’s 19-year-old daughter, Talia, upbraided her for not revealing that she was actually in her 40s.
“You have to tell her you’re old,” she explained, “because on Facebook, that’s creepy.”
Ms. Waldman created a Facebook group to commemorate the incident: “over 40 is ‘facebook creepy.’”
It’s no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying, and that the percentage of active members who are over 25 years old and out of school has risen to some 40 percent of the overall population of about 45 million.
The influx raises questions. Will the loss of the campus sensibility and the youthful gestalt dilute the Facebook experience? And will the newcomers use the site — and change it? Or is it just another example of the fact that Americans age, but never seem to mature?
Joe Uppal, a University of Michigan undergraduate studying anthropology and philosophy, said the age wave “does kind of undermine the ties between Facebook and the college community.
“If everyone and anyone is able to go on Facebook, then belonging to it no longer indicates a college-student identity,” he added.
Similar sentiments have been heard whenever Facebook has expanded, said Matt Cohler, the company’s vice president for strategy and business operations. When the fledgling company first expanded beyond its roots at Harvard to include Yale, he said, “The people at Harvard complained about it and said, ‘Hey, this used to be just for us!’” The fretting subsides each time, he said, “as soon as they go back to using the program and realize this hasn’t done anything to deteriorate their experience.”
FOR the most part, in fact, the entry of millions of people with, you know, jobs and stuff, has been greeted with an epic “whatever,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “The average Facebook user isn’t going to care that people utterly unlike them are doing things they utterly don’t care about on some other corner of the site,” he said.
Facebook can avoid its “there goes the neighborhood moment,” he said, as long as it allows people to stay in their silos and gives them control over who can peek at their profiles. “As long as the individual users still feel their culture is preserved in their corner of Facebook, the growth won’t bother them.”
But the grown-ups are everywhere.
Take a look, for example, at Carl Kasell’s page. Mr. Kasell, the 73-year-old announcer on the NPR news program “Morning Edition,” sends up his own stodgy image on the weekly news quiz show “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!” and he now has 1,602 “friends.” Under personal information, Mr. Kasell gives his favorite quote as: “For NPR News, I’m Carl Kasell.”
Don’t worry, though, if you, gentle reader, don’t have a Facebook page of your own yet; Mr. Kasell isn’t that much hipper than you. He does not actually maintain the page himself. He reads the messages and comes up with responses, and Melody Joy Kramer, the 23-year-old associate producer for the show, enters them onto the page, in a cross-generational partnership.
Ms. Waldman — she of the creepy 40s — finds herself using Facebook in many of the ways that younger people do, except for the sexual cruising: she keeps up with old friends, makes new ones and uses the network to, well, network.
For instance, it turned out that Ms. Waldman’s age, 48, was just fine with the young woman, Lisa Szczepanski, with whom she traded grammar jokes. Ms. Szczepanski lives in Queens and Ms. Waldman lives in Milwaukee, but they have become as close as electrons allow. Ms. Waldman calls Ms. Szczepanski “My Facebook kid,” and got a Mother’s Day card from her last spring. (“Even my own kids don’t do that!” she joked.)
Ms. Waldman also used Facebook in her volunteer work. She leads 12-week family education programs through the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and last spring, she needed a speaker for one of the classes. She posted a request on a Facebook page about mental health, asking for “someone with a mental illness who has experienced breakdown and recovery to talk about their experience with the class.”
She soon heard from Megan Banner, a 20-year-old who had suffered a bout of mental illness in her high school years, recovered and now attends college in Milwaukee. Ms. Banner said she had been thinking about getting involved with advocacy for mental illness issues when she saw Ms. Waldman’s note, and “It was as if it was meant to be.”
They chatted over Facebook and met at a local Starbucks. Ms. Banner spoke to the class and, in a message via Facebook, recalled, “I had the crowd crying.” She said she believed that she “gave some people the hope to continue.”
Since then, Ms. Banner has engaged in more advocacy and speaking about mental health. The evening with Ms. Waldman’s class, she said, “just changed my whole life.”
Young and old will inevitably use the technology of Facebook differently, said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor in the telecommunications, information studies and media department at Michigan State University.
Students define themselves through membership in many social networks in the real and virtual worlds, including classroom, dorms, extracurricular activities and hobbies. “There are fewer of those for adults,” Ms. Ellison said, who “will not be as interested in sharing their love of R.E.M.”
To some extent, a generation gap is already apparent in the Facebook population, said Mr. Shirky, of N.Y.U. Younger people will use it more naturally and differently than older folks, who for the most part will see a Facebook page as something like the dreaded Christmas letter, with its prosaic updates on one’s life events, and less the sense of “living your social life online, hammer and tongs,” the way younger people tend to.
That is only natural, he said, because “People our age are going to find uses for the tool that have to do with the maintenance of life already in process, rather than making one up out of whole cloth” — in part, he added, because “our social lives are more boring.” And that, he said, is only logical: “We’ve made the mistakes we’re going to make, God willing, and we’ve settled down.”
Some longtime observers of technology also wonder if Facebook will hold the interest of adults. Paul Saffo, a technology consultant who teaches at Stanford, said that Facebook’s rapidly multiplying programs and widgets might compromise the simple, clean design that made the site popular in the first place — which could be especially irritating to adults. “We want fewer steps, not more,” he said.
Worse, he said, is that social software means “we all get to be in fourth grade again,” renegotiating the rules of engagement with others. Do you respond to every friend request? Is it rude to cut someone away as part of a friend-list pruning? Once again, he said, “You have to worry about bruised feelings.”
Each new technology for communication, from the telephone to e-mail to Facebook “poking,” goes through a similar cycle, he said. “First we invent the technologies, then we figure out the social norms that tame the technology and allow it to occupy a nondistracting part of our life.” In other words, for Facebook to truly succeed, he said, it will have to recede.
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