♣ See update at the end of the post for a more in-depth take on the subject!
Ronni at Time Goes By has written an excellent post on the free reign elder-bashing seems to enjoy across Facebook. She points out that were you to substitute the terms “women,” “blacks” or others for “old people,” your noxious posts would be whitewashed in an instant. But anything goes, it seems, when it comes to “old people.”
I must admit, when I first signed on to Facebook, I felt a bit like a teenager sneaking into the house late at night, hoping not to wake up the parents — or, in this case, catch the attention of the kids. Reading the quotes Ronni gathered from Facebook makes the blood run cold in my veins, as does the realization that you can’t delete your account on Facebook, only deactivate it. (In some strange way, this maybe a blessing for the old-hating young whose words may well come back to bite them in their eventually sagging asses…)
Here is Ronni’s plea for other elder Facebook users to speak up for change:
It would be good if other elder Facebook members would write on their own blogs about the site’s tolerance of ageist bigotry and join Crabby in canceling accounts and writing to Facebook.
Nothing like this ever changes unless you make a lot of noise about it.
As I was reading Ronni’s post, I must say that my first reaction was to cut and run from Facebook, but I think I’ll stay on as an irritant to those whose allergies include violent reactions to the old (meaning anyone over 21, probably….)
UPDATE: Paul on the Elders Tribune decided to go to the source and joined a number of these “elder hate groups” on Facebook. He found, like Yule in the comments to this post, that a lot of what motivates the forming of these groups is the drive for tribe, and not the target of its banner under which it gathers. In other words, it’s about the sense of belonging by acting up, not acting on…..
Yeah, I’m staying, too.
Interestingly, the majority of my young Facebook friends are local people I actually know in the flesh, while my older Facebook friends are …well, older. I kid around with those younger people in different contexts, some of which are face to face. I don’t think they’d feel comfortable joining a tribe mentality that promotes hatred of a group or demographic.
But then, I also have relatively few friends on FB, not like some people whose accounts log hundreds. Those people (with the stadia full of pals) are mostly younger and typically emerging from factory schooling, too (high schools & colleges, both). Maybe those ageist comments express a deeper problem, focused on an attachment problem that has festered through years of “tribe” mentality in schools, bad peer culture, and what-not.
I wouldn’t want hundreds of friends, and yet they do — or seem to need to do so. Doesn’t that make you think there’s something deeper going on than just “hatred” of “old” folks? Maybe they know that without the tribe (held together by hatred, in this case), they’re nothing.
You make a very good point, Yule, one that I immediately link in my mind with danah boyd’s work on teens in cyberspace and the class differences between users of MySpace and Facebook (all of which has generated enough buzz in the blogosphere without my having to go into lengthy quotes or list of links, except to point to the main essays here: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html (original essay) and here: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions.html (response to the comments on the original essay)
Even from my own experience with teenagers (my own children) and living in the suburbs, I can see how much their lives are constantly supervised (or invaded) by anxious adults of whom many haven’t come to terms with their own authority or aging issues. When I think back to my own youth and how much of my time I spent hanging out with my peers in cafes, houses with no adults present, streets in all kinds of neighborhoods in Europe, and later, beaches and other distant places reached by cars well into the wee hours of the night in the company of my peers in Canada, again without anxious parents worried over us and our prospects for colleges and such … well, I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be a teen these days. Like Bette Middler sang, “You Gotta Have Friends,” and if you can’t have them as readily available as we used to, int he flesh, then the stadia of names, the sheer numbers, can be made into cyphers, I suppose.
Hmm… What is ‘old’ anyway? Old people = parents and teachers, so not surprising that some young people have primitive issues there. For teenagers, ‘old’ probably starts at about 25-30. The posters on Time Goes By are assuming they mean people of retirement age, which makes it much worse.
I’m not saying one should condone the extreme language. facebook should discourage it. These young people will use it in private anyway, and continue to find old age shocking and repulsive, but it behoves society to show that hate speech is intolerable. And immature.
In the ‘developed’ world, demographics are against us oldies anyway. There will be more of us than there are of them, but they will be stronger and in charge, and the earth’s resources insufficient to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed, as well as taking care of the weaker members of society. So I’m not confident of enjoying a respected and peaceful dotage whenever I enter it.
No point boycotting facebook. Would they care? Better to stay there and see what people are up to, and use the network for one’s own purposes. But really. Throwing sheep. Drawing on a wall. Vampire biting. What are grown-ups doing down there?
Was flattered that my son invited me to be his friend on facebook, and even tolerated my giving him a brownie.
They aren’t all bad, these young people.
— Very interesting article by Danah Boyd - thanks for the link, pennywise.
Gosh, I hadn’t noticed any anti-oldness. I’m loving facebook, particularly the scrabble
Gee, this topic is gaining quite a lot of traction out there… It’s strange, b/c like frizzylogic (IT, above), I hadn’t noticed ageism myself, although that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I suppose FB admins should do something to curb hate speech, but that’s tricky, too. flickr is in a lot of trouble in Germany b/c its German site blocks photos that contain nudity, for example (which is soooo ironic since tits & ass are everywhere in German media & advertising). Social engineering makes me nervous, frankly, and telling stupid kids to lay off the hate speech toward old people could get ham-fisted pretty quickly.
In my initial comment (see above), I wrote “…while my older Facebook friends are …well, older,” which is a bit too cryptic or telescoped. What I meant was that my younger FB friends are people I know in the flesh, while most of the older ones aren’t just older, but also people I’ve “friended” virtually, through blogging and such.
I think, Maria, you’re on to something when you shine a light on “…anxious adults of whom many haven’t come to terms with their own authority or aging issues.” Maybe horrible kids come from horrible “old” people (parents). I had a near scrap with someone on vibrantvictoria.ca’s forum over whether or not it was safe for kids to take buses around town — the guy is paranoid about safety & weirdos on the street, and he’s paranoid about “the government” (social services) coming to take his kids away if he’s not supervising them every minute of the day. I wanted to know what the hell he WASN’T afraid of. It’s as though adults don’t trust the resilience and resourcefulness of their own children, and that’s really sad, too. As sad as kids who think all old people stink.
Great discussion here. I wasn’t aware of ageism myself either. But since it has been brought to my attention a few months ago, I started to notice it everywhere. I feel that ageism is so ubiquitious that people are accepting them as the norms.
Thanks for the link too.
Wow, little did I think this little post would generate a buzz, so thanks to everyone for their insights. I am going to elaborate my response in a new post.
And Paul, you are welcome!