Teenagers have always had social networks in some form or another. The one thing they all had in common was that they didn’t want their parents anywhere near it which is evidenced by my kids not allowing me anywhere near their Facebook page. I had the same with my parents whilst growing up in the 1970s when the only medium was the telephone.
In my house, you couldn’t get on the phone because my two older brothers hogged it all the time talking to their mates. I can hear my mother now asking and exclaiming, “What on earth do you find to talk about all the time when you have been with them all day at school!” She would get livid with me because I would carry out a pitiful attempt at homework whilst on the phone to mates planning the weekend. Early multi-tasking.

I personally didn’t, but I had lots of male and female friends who would write intimate letters to complete strangers called “pen-pals”, random people in various countries who you didn’t know. The exercise, promoted by schools, was to actually get to know someone by learning about what they liked and disliked and forming friendships based on common threads, today we know this as crowd sourcing or in the social media world, friend sourcing. 

Every generation of parents have had a difficult time understanding their children’s methods of socializing since it wasn’t the way it was done when they were kids. I have an annual school re-union golf event of about 20 or so good mates, some of which I won’t see until the next event, but if anyone of them were in difficulty, I would be off in a heartbeat to help. It’s because we meet, play, talk, eat, drink and reminisce together that builds this sort of bond. My daughter, on the other hand, has ditched Facebook every since a complete stranger came up to her at a party who knew a lot about her through her open Facebook page.

For all the millions of people socially networking across the planet, relationships may be wider, far-reaching, but with less depth. Perhaps there is way to take today’s social networking technology and combine it with a little of that old-fashioned networking to make our lives richer through our connections. That is what social networking should be about.