Father Knows Best

Young or old, large or small, Wall Street or hipster, 1% or 99%, social media is for everyone. But it is increasingly obvious that older generations are most prepared to properly integrate social media into their lives.

Think about it - my dad grew up in the world before computers. He remembers the very first computers to be adopted on a wide scale. He has seen the evolution from DOS to Windows, to better Windows, to OSX to iOS to Android. He has used them all and has never been afraid to adopt new technology. He has been there every step of the way, and because of it, he is primed for the social media frenzy that has taken the world by storm. Younger generations may be the early adopters of everything coming down the tech pipeline, but Dad and his cronies still have a thing or two to teach us youngsters.

Generations X and Y have had the luxury of having their every desire literally at their fingertips. Much of the thinking that people used to have to do on their own has been eliminated by the omniscient world wide web and smartphones, and smart tvs, and smart everything else. Baby Boomers had no such luxuries. They had to write research papers in libraries with real books, had to wait for the evening news on tv to know what was going on in the world (they actually cared what was happening outside their personal space), had to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy something, had to go to a store to rent a physical video, and if the movie they wanted to rent was out, they had to wait until somebody brought it back.

What did they learn from all of that? Patience. And it has paid off. They haven't wasted the countless hours/days/weeks (months?) on multiple network sites only to see facebook eliminate the competition completely. They've been able to sit quietly on the sidelines while we worked out all the kinks. Now they've gone all-in, and they're showing us how it's done. While we were busy trying to figure out how to get more friends or come up with more clever status updates, they were devising corporate strategies and finding ways to market their businesses to the younger crowds so eager to give so much of their time to the internet. What do we have to show for it? Advertisements and professional networking sites like Linked-In popping up left and right. They've infiltrated our digital playground and flipped it on its head.

They've also learned how to communicate and recognize that social media is a very valuable communication tool:

Younger users are becoming less civil, less PC, and less professional, hiding behind semi-anonymous profiles and usernames, paying no attention to the digital world around them. They're destroying the English language with acronyms and type-os that they don't even realize are type-os.

This guy agrees with me:

They're airing their dirty laundry, swearing at everyone and still trying to preach that facebook is for kids. Meanwhile, our parents are showing us how it's done, like they always have.