Poke! Or how I didn't learn to love Facebook.

Poke is the name of a very silly game that my daughter and I played when she was small. She would hide under the soap bubbles in the bath and stick little bits of her up - a tiny finger or toe - and I had to spot them and poke them before they vanished back underneath. She would play this for hours so we had to institute rules - scores of 10, for example - or we'd be there till the water was cold and her skin, so soft that you could hardly feel it when you stroked it, was all crinkly.
Now poke is apparently something you do on Facebook. I found this yesterday and asked my son what it meant. He is on Facebook every day - of course he won't allow me to be his Facebook friend which is a relief, though I wouldn't tell him that. I don't think I could cope with my inbox being cluttered with the ceaseless white noise chatter. Though I do find it very useful to peer over his shoulder and pick up some teen-speak and teen-thoughts for my WIP.
So poke represents facebook to me - it is apparently something you do for no reason. You poke someone to say hi, I'm here. I can poke my son, even though we're not 'friends'.
I am not a Facebook person. I have myself a page, because I felt that I have to understand this - to stay in my children's world, to stay in the world of 2011. I have tried but I don't seem to enter its world.
For my son, the aim is to have as many friends as possible - he and his friends count their score, try to surpass each other, sign up almost anyone who offers, just to up their score. For me and several of my contemporaries, our scores are in single figures!
It's all about what you understand by privacy or by friendship. Even among my close friends, I will talk to one about some issue and another about something different. They are interested in different things which is they are varied and individual people. For me to put out a message which could apply to all my close friends, plus to all the people I vaguely know, or my children's friends' parents - I would have to come down to the lowest common denominator to find something to say that would be interesting to all and offensive to no one and I don't want to do that. For me, changing the conversation is what makes each friendship personal and special. Facebook friendship is a different thing altogether - all friends, of all levels, the ones you share your soul with and the ones you chat to at the school gates, are all levelled out together.
And privacy - now again, I discovered that my son's privacy settings mean that if one of his friends comments on a post on his wall, their friends can see both the comment and the original post. So complete strangers and people that he doesn't even like can see his comments. Nothing he puts out there is private.
When I learned this, I realised that teenagers now have a completely different concept of privacy. He finds it odd that I should think that strange. Their life with social networking is lived so publicly. Looking over my son's shoulder has told me some surprising things about other teenagers I know only slightly. One posted a list of 'things you don't know about me' - some really quite personal things, of the type I would have shared at her age with my closest friends only, or my diary. All teenagers are in the stage where they value their peer group, they want to belong, they turn outwards from their nuclear family to their contemporaries - that's normal. But now they must surely live their lives as a reflection of everyone else's views, when their thoughts are out there, their activities held up for open approval or comment.
I am fascinated by how they handle their lives with this new element. I envy them the way they can keep in touch - I think of university friends I have lost touch with and how we could have stayed in contact. But then again, how do you lose the people you no longer want to know?! Watching my son handle his social networking life is teaching me a whole new world. It intrigues me but I don't think I can really go there.