"But isn't there something a bit creepy about all this?"
No. There's something creepy about a culture which seems to believe you should only befriend people your own age, and that anything more than 15% either way makes you a pervert.
I do think, however, that you need to be careful what you say. I remember playing Half Life online about 8 years ago, and I caught myself using the same profanities I would use amongst friends at our weekly LAN party. What might be a perfectly innocent profanity to me ;) might raise a few questions if other players were particularly young, and I had no way to know, so I reigned it in a bit. Social networks could easily lead to similar misunderstandings.
A couple years ago, as a happily married 35 year old, I took a few math and physics classes for fun at a nearby community college.
I purposely would not talk to the younger crowd for exactly this "Creepy" issue. Luckily there were a few older students around that I could talk with.
I found after a few classes that the younger people (especially home-schoolers) who had real interest in the technical subjects would seek you out in the math and science labs. I ended up being friends with a few of these students, to the point where they would ask to sync class schedules so that we could work on projects together.
(Males only; there were some smart females in my classes, but for a variety of reasons I had as little to do with them as possible.)
It seems kind of unfair that a person feels compelled to distance themselves from like-minded people, just because of an age difference.
I've only heard that for dating, not friendship. And a friend recently said the rule's origin is in some Jewish teachings about a proper mate... though Wikipedia doesn't mention that.
It's great to see people of different age levels be able to talk to each other and have good conversations, all due to the accessibility of the internet. People from across the world could have great interactions that they would not have if not for the internet.
However, the internet also provides anonymity for perverts and pedophiles, giving them the freedom to do whatever they want.
Younger people may be a bit more wary when someone older friends them because of the latter, which an unfortunate truth.
That same anonymity coupled with distance increases safety. The greatest risk is from those who live close to you so the pervert three time zones away is a lower risk than the pervert down the street who you only notice in passing.
What I think is risky is joining local on or off line groups where it's easy to find where you live / work.
"...because pedophila or cannibalism is mandated in the Internet Terms of Service"
If we eat a pedophile, does that cover both requirements? Or is there a bonus?
Hey -- welcome to the club for people who want to do their own start-ups. It's topic-oriented and self-censoring. Now that I know a 12-year-old is online I'll refrain from posting my entire dirty limerick collection.
I'm wondering, if you downvoted this, is it because you think the internet is more dangerous than people nearby? Is it because you think society isn't paranoid about about men talking to children? The idea of an internet terms of service was to parody the notion that the internet itself is somehow more evil than the people surrounding us every day, which I find is a surprisingly common belief. Please do debate/elaborate as I'd like to discuss your point of view.
Well the thing about befriending people your own age is that they're much more likely to be at the same stage of life as you. So it's easier to discuss things. That's the way I feel about it and you can dismiss this.
But don't dismiss this: The other thing is that an older person can influence a younger one in some ways, mainly because young people are stupid and don't know any better. All I can offer is anecdotal evidence to support that statement.
Well the thing about befriending people your own age is that they're much more likely to be at the same stage of life as you.
To some extent this is a self-fulfilling expectation. If you only ever interact with your age-cohort, you'll be artificially kept 'in sync', and diversity of experience and personal growth may suffer.
As I see it, it's the American media that has conditioned people to think that any interaction between an adult and a child not related to them is suspect.
This is terribly sad. When I was 14, I would have loved to be able to talk to a real scientist.
Why do you immediately assume that an aspect of our culture comes from "conditioning" by the "the American media"?
I think the main reason for it is this: for the most part it's difficult to form close friendships with people significantly different from you in age (14 year olds and 28 year olds really don't have that much in common) so people tend to assume that if they're talking too much then there must be something creepy going on... or at least that they just can't find friends their own age.
I'm a "real scientist". Why would I want to talk to a 14-year-old?
When I was 14 I would have loved to talk to a real scientist. I loved science and technology but my educational access to any sort of professional was extremely limited. One of my most memorable High School teachers taught Chemistry. But during the summers he did real research. He was passionate both about Chemistry and teaching. He touched a lot of lives for the better. Many of his students went on to study in the sciences in college and beyond.
There are a lot of bright inquisitive 14-year-olds out there who could really benefit from access to "real scientists". If you have any inclination towards teaching you might even get something out of it yourself!
I was trying to ask a question, not make an assumption. Sorry if my phrasing was inept.
I lived in America for five years and I noticed that the fear-mongering was much more pervasive there, compared to Australia, where I grew up, and especially to Holland, where I live now.
I'm a scientist too. I love talking to kids about science. Their enthusiasm rubs off on me. I'm not looking to become friends with them though. Can't we distinguish between interaction and friendship?
"Can't we distinguish between interaction and friendship?"
The point of the article is that this distinction is very much blurred in the online world.
We have networks that support all kinds of social interaction, but we call the act of establishing interaction "friending" someone. Well, what does that mean? That you're going to spend all your time chatting about science? Or that you're talking about where the cool parties are.
The original article mentioned that the author checked out a young lady's blog after she sent him a friend request, and quickly found out more than he wanted to know about her personal life. I think that reflects different expectations of boundaries and privacy, even between 31 and 20 year olds.
Coincidentally I'm also a scientist who was brought up in Australia and has spent the last two and a half years in the US, so I can see we're coming at it from similar perspectives.
And actually I don't think that fearmongering (especially about pedophilia) is any more prominent in the US than in Australia, though I can't commend on Holland, where I wouldn't be surprised if it's less (since it's over-the-top in both Australia and the US).
You're right, if we distinguish between interaction and friendship there's nothing creepy about a 14-year-old interacting with a grown scientist. I may have misinterpreted your original comment.
Can't we distinguish between interaction and friendship?
I think that one of the benefits of the online world is that such distinguishing can be decided based on context rather than enforced by offline societal pressures. We don't need to fully throw out the old responses, because there is a grain of truth in their formation. But neither do we need to bring them wholesale into this new medium.
31 is not old age, and I hope when I get to 31 I have 20 year old girl friends :)
However, in the real world it is hard to socialise with people who are not in the same age group as you are for many practical reasons e.g. try going to bars with people who are minors in your group.
Primarily it seems we are indoctrinated by the nature of the societies we live in which seems to teach us it is not good to associate with people much older/younger than you. This seems to be an issue that starts from even the early days of education where the difference is small (in most schools, hanging out with people more than 1 or 2 grades above/below you is often considered weird by the peer groups).
However, online it is more to do with shared interests, ability, and many other factors rather than age. Age does not matter. Cases in point: Who knows the ages of the people we interact with on HN - does it matter? All the startups, in past and present cycles (e.g. soccernet.com, facebook.com) created by very young people - did the users/ buyers/advertisers (most of whom are in different age groups) know or care about this?
You know, my dad always threatened that when my mom turned 40 he'd trade her in for two 20-year-olds ;D He later reneged on that one by saying that he'd developed a taste for the classics in his old age.
online it is more to do with shared interests, ability, and many other factors rather than age.
This hits the nail on the head. Online one's peer group is not dominated by age, but by interest.
As an aside, I went to bars with friends of various ages when I was in my late teens. I just claimed to be the son of one of the other members. And it was Wisconsin, so it wasn't checked too closely. (I didn't drink. Still don't.)
This may be unusual but I make and keep friends based on merit rather than something as arbitrary was what year one was born in.
"31 is not old age, and I hope when I get to 31 I have 20 year old girl friends"
I was thinking the same thing. If there's anything creepy about this guy's post, it's that he got married in the middle of college. I suppose that you would feel out-of-touch with 20-something life if you'd been married for over a decade by the time you were 31!
"Alana's Facebook profile says she graduated from high school in 2006, eleven years after I did, and at a point where I'd been married for three years."
Bah...my apologies. I parsed the above sentence incorrectly, and somehow read "eleven years after I did" as "eleven years after I was married".
Yes that does move the old weird-o-meter up a bit.
I think what's missing is a social trust structure and a goal-based relationship. After all, we see these types of relationships everywhere -- Big Brother/Big Sisters, Boy Scouts, Youth Religious Groups, Mentoring relationships in school and college, etc.
But there's always some kind of goal, and some kind of trust structure built by society to protect (or at least try to protect) the innocent. Now with the net we probably have 9-year-olds chatting up 60-year-olds on the virtues of various sex practices. It's out of whack.
I know I was in a chat system a couple of weeks ago in a room that was politics and "R" rated. (Hey -- politics is always R-Rated!) I got a "hey there" IM from a person with a nickname of "April 14, 1939". We started chatting, and it took about 20 minutes for me to figure out it was a 12-year-old using god-knows-who's nickname. (The bad grammar and vocabulary were a hint)
I know I was uncomfortable. I told the kid he should use sites with his own age group. I also chided him on his poor grammar and vocabulary and told him we'd talk some other time (we didn't).
It's weird and it's uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong -- I'm sure there are good things that can come out of these relationships. Kids need role models. Adults usually have been through a lot of the problems that kids are going to face and can help out a lot. But gee -- you get these "ambush" friendship deals...
I think there's a great potential for good here. I also think there is something very wrong going on. I am reminded of the observation made when TV came out -- it used to be there were "adult" conversations and "kid" conversations, ie, conversations were adjusted based on the audience. With TV, everybody was downstairs in the kitchen late at night talking with all the grown-ups: even if we were only 4. The net takes this context-free-communication thorn up to the next level: chatting bi-directional communication.
A 31 year old guy working in Silicon Valley needs to get over feeling creepy about being friends with 20 year olds. In the future he'll be working for one of them.
From Oxford Dictionary: Friend - a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations.
Developing mutual affection takes time. Clearly, technology has taken this word 'friend' (and many of it's variants) and has - to use the new parlance - mashed it up. Of course, words and meanings evolve but technology has created social platforms that leave behind words and meanings that were shaped over decades and centuries. There's a dissonance between who we think is a 'friend' and what a social platform thinks is a 'friend'. The context is new, the rules are not well established, and the words are awfully inadequate.
I agree with Mr Gray, btw. It is creepy. But, this is quite normal where technology is busy pushing the boundaries.
Being a geek and an Internet geek at that he should be more accepting of people no matter their age. As long as they bring /something/ to the table it makes sense for them to be in your list of "friends". Curiously, IvanB is also on my list (Twitter,Plurk,IM), he's 18, I'm 27 with two kids, no big deal ... he's a Digg/social website animal (good to know for a publisher) and I also helped him try to land a gig at Mixx.
Of note (as the author) I am accepting of it. But if you put a different perspective, what if I were viewing the 20 year old girl's blog at a public Internet terminal? Would that be more creepy? I'm not discounting the individuals. I'm thinking about a third-party's view.
Not really that creepy, and again it's based on content not author. Let's say that blogger was 15 and she blogs mostly about hanging with her friends, music and movies. I'd say you following it would be a bit creepy (as the question always is "why"). Now if that 15 year old was a programmer, hacker or had some sort of insightful ideas than following that blog isn't creepy at all.
As I get older I find that my peers in IT stay younger (please no jokes about high school girls) yet my business peers become older. This will surely hit me even harder when I break the 30 mark.
It seems the brilliance in IT is fueled by the young, and funded by the old.
Even if some younger person is not blogging about programming, there could be all sorts of valid reasons fro reading their stuff. Maybe you are working on a product that targets teenagers, or want to know more about your childrens world, or maybe you are just curious how other people spend their time.
Your are correct, I was just drawing a defined line to simplify the conversation (maybe I went too far). However just as in real life we need to understand that interactions with "kids" need to be done with a consideration of their age, motives and expectations. They aren't lab rats we can monitor and mess with without consequence.
I really don't see the problem? She is writing in a public blog, so what she writes is meant to be read by the public.
What about books - am I not allowed to read books anymore if the characters in the book are not of the appropriate age? Or music - am I not allowed to listen to a song if the singer of the song is 10 years younger than I am? That really doesn't make any sense at all to me.
What about books - am I not allowed to read books anymore if the characters in the book are not of the appropriate age? Or music - am I not allowed to listen to a song if the singer of the song is 10 years younger than I am?
Excellent ideas comrade, I'll contact the Ministry of Truth and see what we can arrange.
Seriously, the thing that bothers me about all of this is that the relationship is automatically cast as creepy and then justifications are sought to make it seem not so. This should be the other way around, no? I think we've all seen one to many episodes of "To catch a predator" for our own good.
When I was 6 a nice man down the street gave me my first coca cola and showed me his Pete Rose rookie and baseball card collection without molesting me! Should I be offended?
I totally understand what this guy is trying to explain. I get invites from folks that were in diapers when I graduated high school, and I always feel that I have to be careful how I interact with them. This is especially true for girls. For boys, it's really not a big deal because there are plenty of ways for younger and older men to have entirely appropriate relationships.
Not so much for girls. Even if I were single, I think I'd have to be careful with girls, and more careful as the age gets lower. Girls tend to bond with and be attracted to male affection, and the ideal source for that is their own father (assuming the father is on the up-and-up) even through a time of courtship (courtship is about making the transition from a father's affection to a mate's affection). It would be entirely inappropriate for me as a grown man to allow a non-adult girl to have misplaced bonding because of my affections, even if they were entirely innocent.
Since I'm married, this is a double no-no. The reasons above still apply, but now since I have now vowed my affections exclusively to my wife, there are very few relationships with other women (particularly young ones) that are appropriate. Work relationships qualify as appropriate, obviously, but independent friendships have to be very carefully considered.
I read books, papers and attend lectures by people much older than me. How is following those people's twitter feeds any different (other than probably being a waste of time)?
No. There's something creepy about a culture which seems to believe you should only befriend people your own age, and that anything more than 15% either way makes you a pervert.
I do think, however, that you need to be careful what you say. I remember playing Half Life online about 8 years ago, and I caught myself using the same profanities I would use amongst friends at our weekly LAN party. What might be a perfectly innocent profanity to me ;) might raise a few questions if other players were particularly young, and I had no way to know, so I reigned it in a bit. Social networks could easily lead to similar misunderstandings.