Parents on facebook

Facebook is a privately owned and opperated and was started by a man named Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his friends at Harvard University and soon grew to include other Ivy League schools. Since then it has seen several stages of development in how user friendly it is as well as the exclusiveness of its members. After being a success in the Ivy League schools, it expended its boundaries to include all universities, then high schools, and eventually to today where anyone above the age of 13 can have a profile.

I understand how one would want to expand the reaches of the company because of the obvious monetary value it could rake in. But there was something about the exclusivity of being a member. It was one thing to open the boundaries to high school kids because of all the social networking opportunities university and high school kids have but it is entirely different to one day get a friend request from you parents. Or perhaps the kid down the hall from you gets a call from his pissed off parents telling him he can't go on spring break because they saw pictures of him drinking beer year last year as a freshman, on a school night, no less! So the ultimate question is one of privacy. I realize one can edit and customize privacy settings on facebook but for some parents, that rule doesn't apply. Parents most often ultimately have the control because even though they may be hundreds of miles away, most kids still heavily rely on parents especially for financial stability.

Another question arrises form the issue; are parents really adequately technology literate to utilize facebook properly and with discretion and good taste? Allow me to provide an example...

After major investors like Microsoft and google affiliates, things have changed. Major amounts of money are invested into advertising and listings and other network links that clutter up what the real point of the site is... to stay connected. Now there are more adverts for oldspice and local "adult friend" seeking websites than there is real information. It has become as much of a perverse dating site as it is a way of keeping in contact with friends and family. In a way, it seems as if the owners and operators have lost site of the original purpose.