Social Media Sees Demographic Shift

Sam Adelman, 21, checks out her father’s latest update on his Facebook profile page.

Zach Hoffman, 20, chuckles while viewing his mother’s Facebook profile page.

By: Sarah Lundgren

ATHENS, Ga.- Zach Hoffman, 20, a pre-med major at the University of Georgia, is a Facebook user with an unusual friend on the website: his 48-year-old mother, Joy.

"It's all good that she has {a Facebook account} because a lot of older people do now. She can just be annoying when she creeps on my friends, and tells me about their lives and my own," said Hoffman.

At first, Hoffman found the presence of his mother on Facebook, a site he considered meant for people his age, irritating. Now he sees more of her friends and his family members joining the site, and says it is the casual atmosphere it was intended to be.

Not everyone is so accepting of parents on Facebook. Sam Adelman, 21, a political science major at UGA, thinks her 58-year-old father Jack uses Facebook to watch her private life.

“I don’t feel comfortable using it as a social tool the way I used to,” said Adelman. “I don’t always want him seeing what I do on Friday night, but there’s always a chance he will.”

She says that adults are ruining one of the best connections she has to others her age. It once served as a private link between her and her friends, but now her father, and adults, can see her life.

Facebook, created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin in their Harvard dorm room, first served as link for college students, like Adelman and Hoffman. According to current statistics on its site, it now links 400 million users of all ages and professions on over 30,000 networks, ranging from schools to businesses.

It does not take a number-cruncher to realize that older users are making their way into the Facebook world. Hoffman and Adelman are probably not the only young adults learning to live with an authority figure as a Facebook friend.

Between June 2008 and January 2010, a report conducted by Peter Corbett for Istrategylabs.com said the 1.9 million members in the 35-54-year-old age group on Facebook grew to almost 30 million members.

The report also said that 41 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. in 2009 were 18-24-year-olds, down from 54 percent just six months before. Though the amount of users in their age bracket continues to increase, they only represented 26 percent by January 2010.

Mark Johnson, 39, a photojournalism lecturer at the University of Georgia, uses the site to connect to his college students. As more people in his age group join him, Johnson says that they make a better use of technology than his students ever have.

“Those of a mature age know how to communicate, when to communicate, and what the appropriate tool will be,” he said. “When I look at student versus colleague or peer usage, there's a much higher degree of efficiency and importance as compared to student usage.”

He believes that members ages 25 and younger do not utilize the social networks to their advantages, making important connections instead of telling their friends about what happened Friday night.

This lack of professionalism may be a factor in user-age, but not all students who use Facebook are shying away from business connections; they just look other places.

Allie Cass, 22, a senior at UGA, joined the website LinkedIn last year in hopes of building professional relationships among the older users typically found on the site.

"I feel a lot of older business professionals are using it,” Cass said, “but I know that plenty of college people are using it in order to better their chances of getting an entry-level job."

Like Cass said, older users, particularly 30-65-year olds, are in fact the most common on Linkedin. If the site follows the trend of Facebook, a demographic shift in age could occur as well, as more youthful users search for what they cannot find on other websites.

Whether it is planning dinner with a dorm mate, catching up with a friend before the 25-year high school reunion or sending out a resume, it seems there is a place for everyone on the internet, no matter what age.

Edited By Courtney Clark