My Mom is My "Friend," the Facebook Phenomenon

We now live in a world our great grandparents would not comprehend.  As a young boy, I still remember how my great grandmother would watch from the porch as I chased her geese around the yard until they would get so angry they’d turn about and start chasing me.  (Never understimate the anger of a gaggle of geese.)  She would also easily (and kindly) destroy me in a game of Chinese Checkers.  But if she were here today and I used the words “tweet,” “blog,” or “google,” she would have no earthly idea what I’m talking about.

The numbers spell out what a wonderous, wireless world we live in.  According to Internet World Stats dot com, 2.1 billion of us use the Internet–that’s roughly a third of the world’s population.  Com Score dot com reports there were 131 billion searches conducted by people over the age of 15 in December of 2009 alone.  That’s four billion searches a day, 175 million searches an hour, and 29 million searches a minute.  And you can bet the numbers are a lot higher now.

Mark Zuckerberg

Okay, let’s look at the social networking site Facebook.  The idea began in the fall of 2003 when Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg was in his dorm room blogging about a girl that dumped him and tried to do something to get her off of his mind.  He hacked into Harvard’s computer network, pulled photos out of the system and asked users who’s the “hotter” person.  The site drew 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views its first four hours online. The following semester, he wrote a code for a new website called thefacebook.com.  After a series of technical and financial moves, Facebook launched to the public in September of 2006. By December of 2008, it had more than 54 million visitors.  By December of 2009, it had 112 million visitors.  As of July 2011, it had more than 750 million users, passing Google as the most popular web site in the world.

Here’s my Facebook story.  The “higher-ups” at work wanted us to expand our branding by expanding into social media.  All four of my kids were already on Facebook, but I never really paid any attention to it.  So with some corporate urging, I eventually decided to create a personal Facebook account in order to create my Facebook “fan” site, Mark@KPAX.   

I fired up the account at work one night just before I went home.  There wasn’t anything on it except maybe a photo and very limited personal information.  When I logged in the next day, I had four or five “friend requests,” and some of them were from buddies of mine I hadn’t heard from in decades.  As the friend requests continually trickled in, I clicked on their “friend lists” and found other past friends of mine.  Instantly, I was hooked.  I re-established friendships I wished I never lost.  And they came from all facets and time periods of my life:  childhood friends from my years in Wichita and Calgary, multiple requests from a large group of kids from my teenage church youth group, former friends when I was a missionary in Italy, old college buddies, former co-workers during my days as a sportscaster in Topeka and Spokane and as a newscaster here in Missoula, current co-workers, hunting buddies, family members who now live in different places all across the country, and the list goes on and on.

At an out of state family gathering, I logged on to a computer.  My mother was there and I showed her my Facebook pages.  She took an interest and noticed that all of her children and most of her grandchildren are also on Facebook.  Ten minutes later, she had her own account and now I can proudly proclaim “My mom is my ‘friend.’”

Now, I am firmly entrenched in the world of social media.  And it offers both social and work-related benefits.  In addition to Facebook, I am also on Twitter.  I also established a YouTube account that recently passed 75,000 page views.  Plus, I have this blog site.  (By the way, the links to all my sites are on the upper right side of your screen.)  I never would have thought I could type my name into a computer, do a search, and it would go to a trio of personal web sites, or that anyone would even care.

Despite all this high tech madness, I do have one Facebook regret.  If only I could receive a “friend request” from my great grandmother.