Growing up on Facebook

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an interesting Essay by Peggy Orenstein on what I call the "Facebook Generation", the group of teenagers that constitute the majority of Facebook's 125 million users. Life is different for this generation, as we are unable to go anywhere without having some tie to our friends and family. Orenstein provides some contrast:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

This Facebook Generation is powerful. The recent expansion of Facebook's user base to members outside of the High School/College realm has sent shivers thorough the younger users of the social networking program. Orenstein admits that this, in the end, may ruin facebook:

More likely, though, the very thing that attracts us oldsters to Facebook — the lure of auld lang syne — will be its undoing. Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.

In the end, Orenstein wants to leave you with the point that the "Facebook Generation" may not actually grow up.

It could be that my generation was the anomalous one, that Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm, parents who expected them to live at home until marriage (adult children are already reclaiming their childhood rooms in droves).

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW - Growing Up on Facebook (New York Times Magazine)