Spring Break
Parents on Facebook
Andrea Robertson
Issue date: 5/20/09 Section: Opinion
Facebook: we all know it, love it, and worship it. It's our personal little place that we use to post things about ourselves and talk to friends who are near and far. But what happens when the sanctity of this place is destroyed and the ones we call Parents start to join?
I didn't see parents joining Facebook as a big deal. I thought it was kind of sad that so many of my peers would relentlessly bash the idea of their parents joining a social networking site that they belonged to. I figured, I'm pretty real with my parents; I don't mind them seeing the pictures, I planned on telling them the story anyway!
So the day that I get that dreaded Friend Request, "Chuck Robertson requests to be ye matey," followed by "Judi Robertson requests to be ye matey," (yes, I feel that every ECU student should have their Facebook language set to Pirate) I didn't think anything of it. I happily accepted their friend requests and wrote on their walls.
Things go smoothly until the day that my cousin, I think she is approximately 28 years old, put on her Mommy shoes and tried to persecute me to my sister. "Do your parents know that Andrea has pictures of her partying on Facebook," she berates my sister. My sister, a 30-year-old mother who hasn't lost the sense of what she was like when she was 21, is blown away by this, because yes, it is ridiculous when your family joins Facebook and starts to police your page. My sister immediately called me to tell me the hilarity behind my cousins tattling, and again I thought nothing ill of my parents on Facebook because they didn't make a big deal of the pictures in question: me and three of my friends meeting Big Black and Bam Bam -- no alcohol or any other indication that we were partying that night were present in those pictures.
Still, I am fine with my family ties on Facebook at this point. However, within a few weeks I have Matey Requests from my grandmother, two of my great aunts, and a cousin that I think I've met maybe five times my whole life. It dawned on me that maybe the support I gave my parents about joining this Web site wasn't the best of ideas -- these mongrels are multiplying like bunnies and I don't know if I can decipher Pirate language well enough to adequately block them!
I didn't see parents joining Facebook as a big deal. I thought it was kind of sad that so many of my peers would relentlessly bash the idea of their parents joining a social networking site that they belonged to. I figured, I'm pretty real with my parents; I don't mind them seeing the pictures, I planned on telling them the story anyway!
So the day that I get that dreaded Friend Request, "Chuck Robertson requests to be ye matey," followed by "Judi Robertson requests to be ye matey," (yes, I feel that every ECU student should have their Facebook language set to Pirate) I didn't think anything of it. I happily accepted their friend requests and wrote on their walls.
Things go smoothly until the day that my cousin, I think she is approximately 28 years old, put on her Mommy shoes and tried to persecute me to my sister. "Do your parents know that Andrea has pictures of her partying on Facebook," she berates my sister. My sister, a 30-year-old mother who hasn't lost the sense of what she was like when she was 21, is blown away by this, because yes, it is ridiculous when your family joins Facebook and starts to police your page. My sister immediately called me to tell me the hilarity behind my cousins tattling, and again I thought nothing ill of my parents on Facebook because they didn't make a big deal of the pictures in question: me and three of my friends meeting Big Black and Bam Bam -- no alcohol or any other indication that we were partying that night were present in those pictures.
Still, I am fine with my family ties on Facebook at this point. However, within a few weeks I have Matey Requests from my grandmother, two of my great aunts, and a cousin that I think I've met maybe five times my whole life. It dawned on me that maybe the support I gave my parents about joining this Web site wasn't the best of ideas -- these mongrels are multiplying like bunnies and I don't know if I can decipher Pirate language well enough to adequately block them!
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