It's so cut and dried. You ask someone to be your friend. They say yes or they don't. Someone asks you to be their friend. You have the same options. Your friends get kept in a nice list, and there are suggestions of other people you might like to be friends with. You can take your time over people's messages without having to respond in the moment, or figure out tone of voice or body language or facial expressions. If it takes you a while to write back, nobody thinks you're ignoring them. If you look at pictures and videos, nobody thinks you're staring at them. If you follow other people's conversations, nobody thinks you're eavesdropping.
Facebook has got to be like heaven for kids who have trouble with the rules of social engagement and the language of social communication. Kids like my daughter, who now has 46 "friends" on Facebook and is enjoying getting to know them better without having to actually, you know, speak to them.
It's not a perfect system, of course. On the one hand, Facebook friendship doesn't appear to translate into real-world friendship particularly well; my daughter has had a few nice online exchanges with kids who've never given her the time of day at school, but that doesn't mean they give her the time of day any more readily now. On the other hand, though, I'd suspect that accidentally posting something embarrassing on Facebook and having it seen by your "friends" and their friends would translate perfectly to the real world, and cause one pain there as well. And as has been recently in the news with the Lori Drew case, online bullying and false identities and malicious misleadings can have tragic real-word consequences, too.
Still, when used with appropriate caution and supervision, it seems like Facebook and other networking sites could offer some real advantages to kids who are little slow on the social uptake. A low-pressure opportunity to learn about others, at their own speed and free of anxiety, may eventually make them stronger when they try it again in the non-virtual world. We're going to experiment with it a bit, anyway.
Has your child tried Facebook or MySpace? How's it going? Share your experiences in the comments.
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I use facebook, and I know how it works. Only recently, I found out that my teenage son has a facebook account. He says he uses it only for some games that he plays on it. Well hubby checked his facebook account, and we were glad to know there wasn’t much activity on it. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to make sure our teenagers are on our friends list. That way, we can easily monitor whatever activities they do on social networking sites like these.