Facebook generation gap

We don't take Facebook for granted the way our children do, with their unthinking postings on each others' walls, their casual use of the F-word on what is effectively a quasi-public forum, their postings of their own photographs in varying states of sobriety and decency. Facebook is a forum that we wish we'd had when we were much younger; so now that we have it in our 40s, we treat it with a certain self-conscious formality, a calibrated theatricality.

When we update our status, we don't just toss off the update with a casual hack-hack-hack of the keyboard; we think before we type, pondering the effect of the status update on its potential readers, and pondering, also, its impact on our image. This is solipsistic, yes; but it is also consciously gregarious--or, better, consciously non-misanthropic.

via Forbes.