Old people Facebook disasters

Younger people are blasé about such humiliations. But to older people who aren't used to making themselves vulnerable online, even minor goofs can be painful and lingering, akin to getting caught naked in an unfamiliar place in front of a crowd. And it used to be worse: Before Facebook modified the default options for what was visible on your wall, every change you made to your profile information was broadcast to your network in real time: "You used to be able to see 'Linda added the Cure to her favorite music.'" says Keenan. (Now Facebook simply indicates what category of your profile you've changed, and you can turn off that option.) "I watched a few friends wrestle with their self-representation, minute by minute. So you'd see, 'So-and-so has added bossa nova to her favorite music.' Then two minutes later, 'So-and-so has removed bossa nova from her favorite music.' Then a minute later, bossa nova is back. Then people struggling to figure out the books: Ian McEwan is on, then off, then on again. It's full of pathos." And doubly embarrassing to be exposed as unfamiliar with the technology, unaware your private identity struggle was being broadcast. "After my initial selection of books, movies and music, I have been loath to add anything for fear of looking so vulnerable," says Keenan.

Further evidence that Facebook is not a friendly tool for older people can be found in the presidential campaign. While Barack Obama has adeptly harnessed the power of social networking (specifically, a Facebook co-founder: 24-year-old Chris Hughes was hired as his "online organizing guru" in March 2007), John McCain has stumbled. A report released by the Pew Research Center this month indicated that Obama had 1.7 million Facebook supporters and 510,000 MySpace friends; McCain has 309,000 and 88,000 respectively. (The report did not mention that the Facebook group 'I Have More Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin' has nearly 122,000 members.) McCain's highest visibility via Facebook came in July, when he was busted by the New York Times for the GOP's creation of a fake Facebook page for Obama. (The Internet is, after all, not Ohio -- the manipulation of technology isn't so easily concealed.) The Pew report praised Obama's early adoption of social networking, and concluded that McCain had been too slow to the table.

Further proof that you can be too old to use Facebook successfully but that it's never too late to make an ass of yourself. What's going on? It's not (entirely) the rise of the new Luddite: People interviewed for this article include a prominent online-media executive and a digital filmmaker. In fact, the ubiquity of technology in our lives may be partly responsible. Call it the BlackBerry effect.

"We're used to navigating fast on the Web," says Bowen. "We're constantly pushing buttons. When you're online, if you make a wrong move, you can just click back. Facebook pages look like any other Web page, but your moves can't be reversed. I admit: I click too fast. I don't think I can blame Facebook for that. I can blame them for a lot of things, but not that."

A more psychic view: Starved of the sociosexual drama of their teens and 20s, people over 30 are eager to join the confessional zeitgeist and thus become careless. "Older people are definitely sillier and more open to admitting things they like that they may not have admitted before," says Keenan. "We are so much more bored than young people, and I think we yearn for high-school-style communication."

To that end: This month, Mara Jensen, a 32-year-old New York City design firm executive, was shocked to discover that her 33-year-old friend -- another creative exec -- was posting Facebook status updates that announced her desire for a booty call and the beginning of her involvement in an adulterous affair. To Jensen, who considers her friend sexually confident even on a bad day, it seemed a bit mental. "I mean, she's got to know everyone can see that," says Jensen. "Right? Or maybe she doesn't. But I don't know how to broach it with her." Which raises an etiquette issue never addressed by Dear Abby: How do you gently tell a friend their entire social network can see up their skirt? And in an era in which Twitter et al. narrow the definition of oversharing on a seemingly daily basis, when does a practical stance become prudish?

There is also the accidents-never-happen theory. "I know a lot of people who use Facebook in an intentionally self-limiting way," says Brian Battjer, a New York City Web developer with a background in social-networking software. "It's a full disclosure. A lot of people who put themselves out there use it as a litmus test for how much they're willing to sell out for the Man. 'If I can't represent who I am in real life, and in the face of my potential co-workers, I'm in the wrong job. I'm good at what I do, and anyone who'll Google me and fire me for that -- fuck it.' The advantage is that you never have to work a job and worry about when the hammer's going to fall because of who you are."

As the lines between public and private behavior continue to blur, we find ourselves living in a time of sublime cultural confusion. Consciously or unconsciously, we're playing out that struggle on the pages of Facebook. "I think the era of having truly separate work, life and relationship realms is dying," says Bell. "It all just bleeds over into each other. There's too much information out there to pretend otherwise."

For now, it's too much to hope that Facebook will be made foolproof. Battjer, the Web developer, says that for all its privacy functions -- you can largely choose which of your friends sees what, what media is displayed on your wall and whether the general public can view your profile or find you by e-mail search, should you have the time and the savvy to set the preferences -- Facebook is still a broadcasting venue. Eventually, social networking will evolve into a more peer-to-peer model, a more direct method of transmission where you can pinpoint exactly who can see what information in certain categories, but that may be decades off. "If I choose to disclose a bit of information about myself, there should be all kinds of custom distribution lists I can broadcast that to," says Battjer. "And until someone comes up with a system to let you tailor your broadcasting more, the current system is going to exist. As people are putting more and more information online, there will there be a demand for people to solve the problem. But for now, to most people, the benefits of social networking outweigh the risks."

Bowen, the accidental purveyor of the hot-tub video, took a short break from Facebook. But just when she thought she was out, its convenience pulled her back in: She missed being able to keep tabs on far-flung friends. And she has noticed that the default option that led to her embarrassment appears to have been changed. Now, you must individually select contacts to whom you want to forward messages. "What happened to me must have happened to other people," she says.

Still, "to this day, whenever I watch a video," she says, "my heart is pounding."