Issue link: https://imageup.uberflip.com/i/595275
4 OUR YUCAIPA | NOVEMBER 2015 Social Media Has Evolved — Don't Be A Dinosaur For Your Kid's Sake By Courtney Fox Taylor I didn't really understand MySpace. In fact, my only friend was Tom. (That's the "free" friend you got when you signed up.) That didn't bother me. I had real friends I could call on my telephone machine and see in person. Then my friend Jolie asked why I wasn't on Facebook. I told her I was on MySpace and Tom and I were just fine. "Everyone's on Facebook now," she said. Fine, I thought. I'll get a Facebook and get my free friend and continue real relationships in the three-dimensional world. But there were people I actually knew on Facebook. Jolie was the first. She had 40 friends. I suddenly wanted to beat her so I started searching for people I knew. There were no "free" friends. You had to know them, send a friend request and hope they remembered you (and were somewhat fond of you) and accepted. Soon I had 30 friends and was closing in on Jolie. Then I remembered my Mormon cousins and zoomed past her to the astronomical number of 74 friends. I felt popular. I searched for more "friends," going all the way back to Troy Love, the boy I had a crush on at Morton Elementary in Omaha, Nebraska, in the second grade. My "friend" count steadily grew. Facebook had interesting quizzes too, back in the beginning. What Disney Character was I? Belle. Which decade was I supposed to live in? 1920s. Was I on a boat? No. And Farkle. Don't get me started. I fell into a Farkle vortex for a month. And then there was a game that I had to build a village and, somehow, needed to use my own money to do it. I extracted myself from that game when I realized I probably could have built a real village in Africa with the money I had spent. My aunt explained to me the wonders of Farmville. "You have crops and you harvest them," she said. "And you can share your crops with your friends and build your farm. You can also buy pigs." I didn't want to even look at it. I suspected it was a trap, like the magical village I had built that added nothing to the actual world. So I decided to pull back from Facebook. I stopped trying to remember people I had long forgotten (probably for a reason) just to boost my "friend" numbers. I realized that Facebook is really a good tool for networking with business people and an easy way to let those in your 3-D circle know where they need to be and when. It was also a great online journal, of sorts. I can look back and see the moments in my life that were meaningful — plays I was in, trips I had taken, family I had lost… and also not-so-meaningful — meals I had eaten, memes I thought were funny, the time I painted my husband's toenail black while he was asleep and let him think for a week that it was dead and about to fall off at any moment. It's also an amazing way to stay up-to-date on the people you occasionally think about but don't quite care enough about to call them and ask them what's going on. Jenny lost 80 pounds. Good for her. Mark is moving back to California. What made him go to Wisconsin in the first place is a mystery. Lynette is happily remarried. Super. Facebook takes a lot of the work out of stalking. My son Benjamin wanted a Facebook page when he was 11 and I didn't see the harm. I let him fudge his birth date so he could connect to his circle of friends. It was a good way to find out what he and his friends considered important. Frankly, it was mostly me posting pictures of him and tagging him. My favorite was Christmas morning a few years ago. I had posted a few photos and realized there was something weird about him. I studied the photos closer and realized he had shaved off half his eyebrows. (He has super bushy eyebrows and on an earlier picture of him, a cousin had commented "I'll take Eyebrows for $300 Alex." That caught on as the family saying for a bit…) As he got older, there was too many moms and aunts and grandmas on Facebook and he pulled back, as he started doing in 3-D world. Then along came Instagram. He joined that and stopped being on Facebook at all. I slowly realized that I missed him. Sure, he was here, in the house, all elbows and hormones, eyebrows successfully grown back, but he was starting to fade, voluntarily, into the background — he started spending more time in his room on the computer or looking at his phone. So I joined Instagram. It was different from Facebook. I didn't quite get in the groove but I had a few contacts and I could see the little he posted. "Okay. Where are you?" I asked him one day. "Sitting here," he said, staring at his phone. "No, I mean, you never say anything on Instagram. The last post was a photo from a concert about a year ago Where are you online?" "Oh. Twitter." So I sat down and figured out Twitter, as much as anyone over the age of 20 can figure out Twitter. Here's what I think I know: You follow people and they follow you (full on stalking here, no one is even pretending anymore). You can post short posts and then people can "retweet" them or star them, which is the equivalent of "liking" on Facebook. Mostly it's movie stars, singing stars, politicians, weight loss centers and teenagers. I think there are four mom types, counting me. So I started "following" Ben. He is now pushing 16 and has a bit of a mouth on him, which he decided to share in some "tweets." "Take down your last tweet," I said nearly every day the first two weeks I was on Twitter. "Why are you on Twitter?" "Because I'm trying to save your reputation so you can get a job someday and move out." "I'm going to block you." "You block me and you lose your phone." I started "following" his friends from school so I could see what they're up to as well. It's startling what the kids will do when they know that there are only four moms in all of the Twitter universe and none of them are theirs. (If you have a teenager, you might want to hop on and see for yourself. Be warned: it's not for the faint of heart.) Most of his friends realized I was following them and quickly blocked me. Ben hardly ever tweets anymore. It's small but I'm counting that as a success.