While it is teenagers who have embraced social media, the people who should really embrace it are the elderly. Being old is, among other things, socially isolating because it is harder to travel and meet people. Social networking was designed to bring old friends together in spite of distance, and it does a great job.
But teens have all of their friends near them (mostly), while older people have a much more geographically distributed friend group. My parents have gotten in touch with many old friends using social networking, which seems to imply that the usefulness of Facebook is trickling upwards, but it needs to trickle faster. Anything that can make housebound old people feel more involved with their friends and the world can’t come fast enough.
On a similar note, someone (maybe me?) should get together with historians and create a “primary sources” website that is essentially a bunch of youtube videos of people telling stories from their lives that they think others might be interested in. People who survived the great depression are dying out – this may be our last chance to hear about the great depression from someone who lived through it as an adult!
And the exact same logic applies to every other historical time period of the 20th century. Let’s bring together personal accounts of historical events, and give historians the same problem that we’ve given the biologists! Prior to CS and high-speed data processing involvement in Biology, data was hard to get and rare. Now it is so plentiful that figuring out what data to throw away is one of the big skills required of the modern biologist! By making it easy for primary sources to upload their own stories, we can prevent these points of view from being lost forever.
The Internet is for old people, but many of them just don’t know it yet. Let’s save their stories for future generations, and let’s help them de-isolate themselves and connect with friends old and new.
