Old people Facebook disasters

Professionals over 30 have joined the networking site in droves, but with great convenience can come great embarrassment.

By Michael Martin

Read more: Technology & Business, social networking, Life, facebook, Michael Martin

Sept. 29, 2008 | The day that Kim Bowen accidentally sent a video of a woman shitting in a hot tub to 200 of her co-workers was the day she knew her relationship with Facebook would never be the same.

"It was horrible," says Bowen, a 30-something filmmaker, in the tremulous tones of a former bank hostage. "I'm a pretty wild person. I like a laugh. But not like that."

What happened was this: A friend (now former) posted a video on Bowen's Facebook wall. It depicts a bikini-clad woman sliding into a hot tub occupied by two other women and a man. Seconds later, she is overcome by a gastrointestinal issue that sends her tub mates scrambling for refuge. (The video, which originally appeared on the purported humor site ebaumsworld.com and today persists on YouTube, has been largely debunked as fake.)

This was cold comfort to Bowen, who uses her Facebook account mostly for professional networking. "It was disgusting," she says. "I thought, 'I don't want that on my wall.' So I went to delete it. Then an on-screen message popped up: 'Your video has been forwarded.' And I thought -- what? Who has it been forwarded to?"

In her haste, Bowen had clicked "Forward" instead of "Delete." Facebook automatically selected all her contacts, e-mailing the video to "clients, agents, studios, everyone," says Bowen. "A famous producer I'd 'friended' but never contacted -- my face showed up on his Facebook page next to a Jacuzzi diarrhea video."

Fortunately for Bowen, Facebook allows wall postings to be deleted by the poster, so she spent three hours in triage, visiting page after page to excise the offensive snippet. But several people had already watched it, and Bowen immediately found herself frozen out of polite online society, a seemingly scat-obsessed Lily Bart. "Some people I used to work with, the only message they received from me in the last year was that video. I have not heard from any of them since," she says. "I posted a status update that said, 'Kim is very traumatized by the video she forwarded by mistake.' And nobody replied! I would have loved somebody to say, 'Wow, hey, what's going on with you? Or, 'Uh, is this what you're into now?' But there was ... total ... silence." She shudders.

The events of that day, random as they may seem, point to a dubious trend. For years, college students have been opting out of future employment via boobie-flashing, obscene status updates and the pictorial remembrances of keg stands past on their social-networking pages -- "Ladettes glorify their shameful drunken antics!" screamed one typically British headline in the U.K.'s Daily Mail -- but now, the voices of reason, the beacons in the online wilderness, the adults who once clucked their tongues over the follies of youth, are lining up to humiliate themselves on Facebook.

Although the site exploded into public consciousness as a college network, now it's for everyone. (Literally everyone: From cheese enthusiasts to fans of the '80s robot-girl sitcom "Small Wonder.") More people over 30 are adopting Facebook as a networking tool, and this was the year the old people swarmed the pool party. (By the way, when we talk about "old people," we don't mean old people. We mean "old people in Facebook years" -- so anyone on the northern side of 30 is a winner.) There are seven interest groups for people in their 40s, and one for people born in the 40s. The spunkily titled group "Over 30 -- Not Over the Hill!" began in May and already has 823 members. There is, inevitably, a Cougar Club. "Since this summer, Facebook use has exploded among my age group and older," says Linda Keenan, a 37-year-old mother who wrote a Huffington Post blog entry in July describing herself as an "aging Facebook whore." "You should look at the group 'Creepy Old Guys on Facebook' -- it's awesome."

But romping through the kids' playground can result in stress fractures. "The funny thing in general about Facebook is that you're there with your colleagues and your friends," says Laura Bell, a 40-something New York magazine writer [most names and identifying features have been changed at the subjects' request, to spare them further mental anguish], "and the next thing you know you've forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are."

Social tragedies involving CC:, BCC: and Reply All are as old as the Internet itself, but Facebook's applications -- the seemingly cute survey and quiz tools that allow you to rank, rate and refer friends -- have added a new level of peril to online interaction. Recently, Bell was killing time with the Compare Friends app, which selects five random members of your Friends list and asks you to rate them according to ephemeral criteria. In this case, the question was, "Who smells better?" One of the five contestants was Bell's boss, whom Facebook notified of her low rank. She then e-mailed Bell to express her dismay.

"If you look at how it's set up, you have to manually opt out of it notifying your friends of your choices. Which is rather sadistic when you think about it," says Bell, who laughed off the snafu but has not indulged in the Compare Friends app since.

When Karen Price, a 50-year-old writer, joined Facebook, she was immediately friended by a prominent D.C. media critic. Soon she learned he had been comparing her attractiveness and datability with that of other women. "I'm sure he has no idea I was e-mailed that by the Compare People app folks," says Price, who was thoroughly weirded out. "I wondered why he was comparing me with another woman in media," she says. "And then why he found me prettier but another woman more datable. I told myself I shouldn't wonder about any of this silliness, but ... I wondered. It was like finding out your name had been written on the boys' room wall in high school. I mean, we live in different cities. He's married. It's not really about socializing or thinking about dating people, it's just -- wow, after all this time, when none of that stuff is realistically in question ... um, it's in question?"

As a vehicle for working through your delayed adolescence, Facebook's potential is nearly limitless. "In my case, 55 percent of my graduating class are on it, and I really want to show them that I'm having a better life than any of them: I've been to more places, I've fucked more people," says David Taylor, a 32-year-old novelist. "It's sort of a surreptitious way to brag about your life, and there are applications that help you do that. You can chart all the countries you've been to, ask people to vote on what celebrities you look like. The pro is that you get to rub everyone's faces in your life. The con is you look like a twat."

But photographic bragging rights come with a price. "The 'tagging photos' option [in which people label you in their photos and link to your profile] is a danger," continues Taylor. "I've heard of people claiming not to be at an event, and then it shows up on Facebook -- they're there, three sheets to the wind, with a hooker's tit in their mouth and their name splashed over the photo."

In the rush to accumulate friends, relationships get tangled. "You superpoke everyone, including your ex-boss, and I fell prey to that 'Who has a crush on you' thing," says Keenan. "It's about the colliding circles on Facebook and forgetting who you've friended. After the Palin-daughter-is-preggers story, I said in a status update that I 'feel less of a woman that I have never slept with a Levi or a hockey player' and then realized my 13-year-old nephew was probably reading it."

Next page: "We are so much more bored than young people"