Having the social media talk with your folks

One early evening while I was over to Gram’s, ABC World News Tonight broke the story about Twitter. I thought “Great! how was I going to explain this to her?” I know I make some of my living explaining blogging and social media to people, but its a whole other animal explaining it to your parents.

So I pulled it up my phone, showed her my Twitter account and explained that it was like a bulletin board that tells people what you are doing.

I thought that was it and then a story with Facebook came up. I then had to explain that not everyone can see my profile and that only some people can only see some things, not everything (BTW, I wrote a post as to how to control who sees what in Facebook).

Finally the news about Craigslist hit the fan. I then had to explain  to both Gram and my father that I couldn’t remember the last time I sold anything on CL. If I did, I always met the person in a public place ( as a New Yorker, that’s just plain common sense.)

No matter how old you get, parents are still going to be parents, fearful and concern for their child’s safety whether online or offline.