Facebook may have begun life as a social network exclusively for college students, but it’s now open to all, with no restrictions placed on the age, educational background, or occupation of potential users. Which is great except for the fact that this means parents can now join the site and see everything their kids get up to.

Facebook, and social networks in general, are aimed at the young. Adults over a certain age are far more likely to pick up the telephone or even write a letter in order to get in touch with friends or keep family members up to date. But the younger generation will just update their Facebook.

This generation gap in the way we communicate and keep in touch with our peers may not be a bad thing because it means the two sets of people are separated. After all, no kid wants their parents to know what they’ve been up to, who they’ve been sleeping with, or how drunk they really got last night.

Parents are slowly realizing the benefits of being more tech-savvy, and a high percentage of them use this new found knowledge to spy on their kids. And this trend for parents using social networks, mobile phones, and other fairly new forms of communication to stalk their children is only likely to increase with the introduction of a new ‘Facebook for Parents’ course at Stanford University.

According to The Mercury News, the four-part course begins on February 19, and is already fully booked. The teachers, Linda Phillips, and her brother, BJ Fogg, claim “responsible parenting means being aware of what your children are doing,” and this course can obviously help with that.

The ‘Facebook for Parents’ course will teach the basics of the social network to interested parents, as well as delve deeper into the workings of the site and studying how it could be shaping youngsters’ relationships with each other and the older generation. It will also teach what the 81 types of actions available on Facebook (by Fogg’s reckoning) are.

I’m not too sure what to think about this. It’s good that older generations are looking to get involved and not be left behind when it comes to utilizing the range of services and sites the Internet generation has at its disposal. But it’s not good for youngsters when their parents add them as friends on Facebook and instantly have access to everything they are doing and saying. There is always the option to ignore them I suppose but that does seem a little harsh.

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Entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 8:28 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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