Making Myself Younger Is Making Me Old!

After studiously avoiding it for most of my career, I am now belatedly learning the value of networking... that the next person I meet may be the source of my next job. With that in mind, and after a prodigious amount of prodding by my millennial associate, Jen Richer, I have joined the world of Facebook! What an eye-opening experience this has been! In a matter of minutes, I found myself potentially in touch with hundreds of people - many of whom I do not know... and many of whom I'd like to forget! Just by enrolling, it gave me a much better grasp as to the marketing potential and potential reach of social media - how each individual person has the ability now to slice and dice and customize his or her world according to his or her interests, yet at the same time, reach out globally to virtually everyone they've ever known. Surfing around, it quickly became clear just how much of a generation gap exists in the world of communications. I did a search for people in my high school class - Springbrook '79 - and found about a dozen of my classmates have discovered Facebook. By the same measure, I bet if my friend, Jen, did a similar search, she'd be able to account for virtually her entire class!

This whole Facebook affair has caused quite a stir in Chez Matthews. When the Missus heard that I'd signed up, she became immediately suspicious. It's that generation gap thing again.... Robin hears the word Facebook, and it conjures up visions of perverts trying to arrange sex online with cops posing as teenage girls... Meanwhile, when my 14-year-old son found out Dad had a Facebook account, he immediately asked for an account of his own. He was disappointed to learn that Dad signed up purely for "business reasons", and that even in my newly enlightened state, I'm not ready to supervise my OWN account yet, let alone worry about what his hormone-afflicted brain would do with his own page!

There's gotta be a way to marry my traditional media background to this new-ish concept of personal social media. At the crossroads where those two forms meet may very well be where my future career will be waiting... I hope.