Do you have a Facebook page?

I didn’t.  It appears that I was in the minority.

Everyone who is anyone it seems, has a Facebook page. A week ago I got an email from a friend who had recently joined the network.  “Come check out my Facebook page,” the invitation read.  And so, being just the slightest bit curious, I did.

Not surprisingly, you can’t look at someone else’s Facebook page unless you have one yourself.  OK.  I’m game.  I’ll sign up and see what happens.  The process was fairly simple.  You enter a few seemingly innocent, demographical bits of information and all of a sudden, you are a part of the Facebook generation.  Only here’s the interesting part.

Before you know what has happened, Big Brother Facebook has gone into your email contacts and sent emails to all of your friends and relations to see if they want to be your “friend”.  It turns out that lots of the folks that I call friends and relations were already in the club.

Much to my children’s surprise and embarrassment, not only were invitations sent to my limited social network, but theirs as well as I had the email addresses of many of their friends in my contact list. 

“Will you be my Facebook friend?” The invitation asked.

And to my kids’ distinct horror, their friends said “Yes”.

The floodgates had opened.

I’m a fairly conservative parent.  When the entire population under the age of 18 had My Space accounts, my kids did not.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the internet exhibitionism that went on in that world.  It concerned me that personal details were being broadcast into cyberspace along with photos, thoughts and, in many cases, incriminating information that, unbeknownst to the “authors”, was being monitored by local police departments.  It just seemed like a bad idea.

You see, it’s all about protection.  Sure it’s fun being able to send messages back and forth.  I’ll admit to getting a smile on my face when I open my email and see that someone has “written on my wall”.  On the other hand, the jury is still out on what this means for personal privacy as anyone in your network and your network’s network can see everything on your “page”.  To be a participant, you have to understand that everything you post is there for the world to see.  You have to be very conscious of what you put out there.  There is no such thing as privacy.

And I have to wonder, do teens, who are the biggest uses of social networks, have the ability to really understand what that means?