"Mommy, I saw on FB that time you..."

With the huge implementation of social media in our everyday lives, our lives are very well documented. So well documented that in the next few generations, listening to grandma and grandpa tell stories of their childhood will be extinct. In a few decades, teens will be privy to all the pictures, comments, ex-relationship statuses, instagrams, and tweets their parents posted at their age. It makes for some interesting changes in family dynamics. I predict that when the time comes, parenting blogs will be talking about whether it is good or bad to limit their children's ability to view the past or whether it is a beneficial tool in their relationship so their children can see them as human beings. Regardless of which way is the best way to handle that situation, it is bound to happen. It may very well change the amount of information we share through social. It could also spawn a generation that may shy away from social...effected by the shock of seeing their parents as anything other than their embarrassing out of date parents.

FB Success Story

Jenessa Simmons is a 21 year old woman who was adopted and was having trouble searching for her birth parents. Sounds  like a pretty typical story...except in this one case, this woman used the power of Facebook to find her birth mother within two days. This story tells us several things.

One, searching for family is a more noble cause than the near spam-like "1 million likes for..." People become more invested in the cause which generates a lot of buzz. (& We are getting really sick of people chasing after mass "likes.")

Two, anything is possible when you have 161,000 people tapping into their personal network to help you.

Three, feel good stories from the internet is still considered news-worthy because of the large amount of people invested in it.

Four, no matter how good this cause nor how successful Jenessa was, it will be incredibly harder for anyone else to gain the same amount of traction. This is the case because people find repetition uninteresting and annoying. They are plugged in for new information.

Profile Analysis

http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/facebook-mental-health/

This article on Mashable describes the findings of a University of Missouri study on the psychological indicators found on a Facebook page. The indicators included Facebook activity frequency and unusual interests. The basis of this study of 2,000 college students according to researcher Dr. Martin, is that a social networking profile can provide insight to a person's psyche that other methods cannot. "Because of the real or imagined perception of anonymity, the Internet may allow unique access to the psyche. One’s social networking information can be understood as an example of one’s naturalistic behavior."

This claim in it of itself is revealing of the attitude of social media today. People projecting their real-life personalities and tendencies onto the internet has become something of the norm and expected. A great deal has changed to social society; from the skepticism of the internet upon its debut decades ago, to the expectation of psychological analysis from a social profile today.

The findings of this study however, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The research is based on the assumption that all college students use social networking as an exact T to their inner self. The truth is more likely that the profile they create is an image of an "ideal" character they strive to attain. Any evaluation using social media analysis should be viewed as an ideal reflection than a true one.