Even though I have grown up in the age of computers, I still feel that there is a big gap between me and the people who are even just five years younger than me. Recently, I was speaking to a college senior about her facebook profile (she was showing me the sites... apparently I had been missing a whole bunch of features on facebook that I had never even heard of) and as it was happening, I realized that we had fundamentally different concepts about the purpose of social networking sites and even the Internet(s).
"Adding yourself to facebook groups is a form of self expression" she said. She totally blew out of the water any idea I had about an online group being useful for actually
doing things (like polling about weekly attendance to a dinner club for example). I had always felt that online groups should be tied directly to what is happening in the real world - what use would a group even have if it wasn't monitoring something in real life, like schedules or checklists for my research group for example - but hey, what do I know? Self expression.
Another thing that shocked me was the concept of a wall post. I had always linked the idea of wall posts with testimonials on friendster (one time comments from your friends telling the rest of the world how cool you are), which I think it extremely "web 1.0," since they are static and not meant to change or be 'participatory' in any way. When I looked at the girl's wall posts, she had about one thousand posts, which I could hardly believe. Apparently, the kids use wall posts as messaging systems. But unlike email, your correspondence with them (hey, saw you in the quad and yelled across to you, but you were too busy flirting it up with that annoying girl from english class, etc.) is totally public. Actually, the entire idea of privacy has been uprooted by all this new online stuff - kids today, apparently, view privacy in a completely different manner than their parents (which leads to all this nervous parent - DOPA legislation stuff) and differently than even people who are my age. New York magazine (I think it was) had a cover story the other week about just that idea - how privacy is defined differently by the online generation. As I wrote about last fall (in relation to social networks), kids today have grown up with idea of having your information publicly available online, such that having photos or videos of yourself, your IM screen name or even your phone number listed in your facebook profile is no big deal. Even though I am pretty young (wouldn't you all say?), it surprises me how far apart my idea of safety and privacy is different than people in college today.
Interestingly, the college girl was talking to me about her use of email - she was waxing nostalgic about it (I had just told her how I used email rather than facebook messaging) and she was saying things like: "it must be nice, you can write longer letters." It surprised me. I realized she thought of email as a more formal means of communication than I did (personally I use email for everyday things like seeing if people are free for lunch?) It seems that she looks at writing emails in the same way that I look at writing snal mail (i.e. a forum for writing longer letters with a longer lag time between responses). I suddenly saw how much of my pre-computer life influenced the way I used things online - and how these college kids didn't grow up with that same baggage.
A funny story though- while the college girl and I were marvelling at the difference between ourselves, I asked a classmate of mine (who was in the same room) if he had realized about that generation gap - "what did you use for communication in college?" I asked. Not realizing that he was 4 years ahead of me (about the same age gap between me and the college girl), he kind of chuckled and said: "The phone... and no, not a cell phone. A landline." I'll admit- I was confused for a minute. Then I had to laugh.
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