The Social Network of my kids

Of course, after I post about this blog being more jour­nal and less soap­box, I have an idea that war­rants a seri­ous look and a blog post. The idea mor­phed in the few hours I pon­dered it yes­ter­day, start­ing out as a con­cept for a kid’s social net­work gov­erned by the social net­work of the par­ents and turn­ing into a more philo­soph­i­cal con­cept of what my (one day) kids will think of the social net­works I am so deeply inter­twined with.

The orig­i­nal idea was this: What if there was a social net­work that was built with fam­ily struc­ture in mind. So if I, John Lith­gow, and Charles Bron­son were all par­ents and were marked as friends on the social net­work, then our kids (all Juniors, respec­tively) would then be able to inter­act on the net­work as well. It’s sort of the idea of a play­group taken into the realm of the social net­work. Ide­ally the parental involve­ment would end at set­ting bor­ders and lim­its as to who their child(ren) can inter­act with, but not such that they are noti­fied of every action taken by the child.

It’s an inter­est­ing con­cept and one which kept my mind churn­ing for a while last night. Social net­works are built for the now, even Facebook’s attempts to iden­tify and build social maps with users defin­ing how they know each other, is still a fairly fee­ble setup com­pared to what could be done.

So this idea mor­phed more into the con­cept of ask­ing, what will the social net­works of the next gen­er­a­tion look like? Will par­ents and kids inter­act on the same social net­work? Will par­ents be shunned from their kids pro­files, as par­ents are not exactly wanted when the kids get together and hang out? Or really will large fam­i­lies (like mine) begin their own social networks?

My dad isn’t on Face­book, though he has been using online dat­ing recently. But I have sev­eral friends who are heavy Inter­net users and their kids will soon be old enough to do their own share of inter­net using, will they be fol­low­ers of each other on Twit­ter? Will the kids block the par­ents for an attempt at online pri­vacy? The alter­na­tive is also that the kids will embrace the open­ness and sim­ply accept that par­ents find out about mis­deeds which get shared, and thus they accept penal­ties with­out much sur­prise. Or, the flip­side is that the chil­dren will be shut out of these social net­works and seek out ones that their par­ents aren’t present on, thus putting a surge into the smaller net­works as the kids seek refuge from their par­ents’ ear.

Will Face­book look the same in a decade? Will it even exist? Not if it can’t begin turn­ing seri­ous profit. What about Twit­ter? Will it fade out as smart phones become more per­va­sive and things like Tum­blr or other miniblog plat­forms really take off? We’ll have to wait and see.