“But, what is a hashtag?” my mom asked me over breakfast this morning. Sometimes, my parents ask me questions about social media and mass communication because they think I’ll know the answer. C’mon, I’m in the J-School and I’m supposed to know these things, right? The answer is complicated. Yes, I know what a hashtag is, but you try explaining it to someone who has no concept of social media. It’s more difficult than you’d think. Now, this discussion goes far beyond adults on Facebook or texts between parents and their kids in which autocorrect got the best of the adults. This is an outright war between adults and technology, and it’s not what you think. I’m going to use my parents as an example.
My dad is an electrical engineer, and he knows technology. I’m sure he even knows about technology that has yet to be developed, but he didn’t know he could take a picture on his phone in black and white. My mom, a paralegal, knows her way around the Internet. She texts, probably as much as me, but she lays her phone down on a flat surface and types with only her index fingers. It’s the wrong way, but it feels right to her. She has a side business where she lists things on eBay, so she knows how to take photos, upload them, shrink their dimensions, import documents and create a listing. But, when she signed up for Facebook three years ago, she typed “how to delete Dana Dean on facebook” into the status bar, thinking it was the search bar. Dana Dean, although I changed the name, was my mom’s high school friend who had added her on Facebook, but my mom no longer wanted to see her posts. (Luckily, I caught the status and frantically called my mom before any damage was done…as far as we know.)
A discrepancy exists between adults and the way in which they use technology. They adopt it, evident in the increase in adults on Facebook, but they use it in their own way. Now, think about the way we react to their attempts to integrate new technologies or networks into their lives. We laugh. In a post on adults writing on a restaurant’s Facebook page, Mary Madison explains her reaction to the posts.
“Technologically challenged parents writing on company's Facebook walls? Man this stuff is golden. Couldn't stop laughing and relating it to my mom's experience on Facebook.”
I am not at all saying it’s wrong to laugh at them (it really is hilarious), but we have to consider that what we were born into, they have to adopt. That’s the reason adults on Facebook are so funny. We know exactly what’s lame and what’s not because we were with it from the get-go and these technologies and advancements are a central part of our lives. For adults, social media and technologies like it are just an addition.
Neither of my parents like social media, so this morning I asked them why. My mom doesn’t like it because she doesn’t understand how to use it. My dad, who doesn’t use any form of social media and likely never will, doesn’t like it because he doesn’t see the practicality of it.
“I will only care what a hashtag is or does when you explain its practical use in my life,” he says.
And for the most part, I couldn’t explain that to him. I don’t know how using a hashtag would affect his daily life. As far as I can tell, there’s no effective way to fix the disconnect between adults and the way they adopt the next big thing. If I signed my mom up for Twitter today, no matter how much time I spent educating her on the dos and don’ts, she would not use the site like I do, or even the way most people do.
So, I will continue to laugh at the man who can build a cell phone battery but can’t figure out how to make a photo vertical, and the woman who runs a small business based entirely online, but will never understand the difference between her Facebook newsfeed and her own page.
Maybe one day I’ll be able to explain the purpose and practicality of a hashtag. For now, I think I’ll continue making up an answer and hoping my mom buys into it, like in the clip below. Most of the time, she will.