73 and Loaded With Friends on Facebook
WHEN Amy Waldman first signed on to Facebook last year and started to send joking messages about good grammar back and forth with a new 18-year-old friend, Ms. Waldman's 19-year-old daughter, Talia, upbraided her for not revealing that she was actually in her 40s.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act in a year-long arc the Times has been tracing about who belongs on Facebook. In June 2007, the paper covered teenagers' alarm when their mothers joined the network — a story framed entirely from the kids' side of the wall. Five days before this piece ran, BoomTown's column on Facebook apps skewing toward toddlers was already poking at the assumption that the site maps neatly onto any single generation.
First-order effects
- Amy Waldman's exchange with an 18-year-old friend shows the immediate friction: her daughter Talia upbraided her for not disclosing she was in her 40s, meaning teens are now enforcing age-disclosure norms that adults signing up have never been told exist.
- Users in their 70s building friend networks on Facebook directly expand the site beyond its founding campus demographic, changing who a new member expects to encounter there.
Second-order effects
- As parents and grandparents arrive, the friend-list stops being a peer group and becomes a mixed-generation space, pressuring Facebook's privacy and visibility defaults to do work that physical separation used to do.
- Teen users' sense of Facebook as their own territory erodes, which is precisely the dynamic the June 'omg my mom joined facebook!!' coverage flagged — now arriving at grandparent scale.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's structural trajectory bends from closed youth network toward all-ages communication utility, forcing the company to redesign around intergenerational audiences rather than cohort homogeneity.
- Age becomes a disclosure problem rather than an obvious fact online — a norm question platforms will keep inheriting as each new demographic comes aboard.
The trend: Facebook is absorbing successive older demographics faster than its teen-originated social norms can absorb them, pushing the network from campus club toward all-ages infrastructure.