Boomers and Facebook

I've been on Facebook for almost a year now. I joined because it seemed like a natural connection between me and my college-age staff. It took a while for me to get enough friends so as not to appear totally lame. My rule was that I would not add anyone who was college-aged or younger - they would have to add me. I added a few other Boomer friends who were just discovering Facebook. So now I have over 100 friends, of which I interact with maybe six of them (write on their wall, send them messages, post items of interest).

For the most part I have enjoyed being on Facebook and have become an afficiando of Scrabulous, Facebook's addictive Scrabble game. But there is something that bugs me about Facebook that I would like to address but don't dare do it on Facebook lest I be seen as an old curmudgeon [and if I don't like it I shouldn't be on Facebook because it wasn't designed for me in the first place, right?]. It's the constant stream of photos of drunken children (what I consider anyone under 30) that make me want to scream "guys/girls do you really want everybody you know to see your drooping eyelids, stoned-out smiles and do you really have to include the obligatory middle-finger shot?" Occasionally somebody puts up pictures that are little slices of life and don't include Bud Light beauty shots but most of the pics (especially from the younger kids) are "look how drunk I am." It is just so cliche.

Now, if we had Facebook when we were college-aged would we do anything differently? Nope. Jeez, getting old and crotchety is no fun at all.

Oh, one last thing. In this age of wonderful digital cameras won't somebody PLEASE learn to use "red-eye" flash properly? Or, failing that take two minutes to fix all those red eyes in Photoshop - you know you have it on your laptop, you mom and dad spent the extra dough so you could have the best technology so USE it, OK?