Day 21 – Teenager Hangouts

Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw a post reminding people not to air their dirty laundry on Facebook.  And I was initially taken back, because the people invited last to Facebook are now telling the first people on how to use it.

Facebook was designed as a virtual hangout for college students.  It slowly opened up to everyone.  With including everyone, the feel and purpose changed.  Right now, it is a public forum, even if you lock down your settings and are particular about who you friend.  People censor themselves more and more on these mediums.  While this is necessary, it didn’t start out this way.

I feel for teenagers who are trying to find a space to hangout with their friends.  Since the term “teenager” was coined, they have been kicked out of their hangout spaces.  As far as I can tell, since I am no longer a teenager, kids have moved to self destructive post technology.  They use Snapchat and similar programs to send messages to their friends that disappear after so long.  If there is no record, they can’t get kicked out, older people can’t move in and they can’t get in trouble.  Right?

On the way home today, I thought of a different concept that would be interesting to see developed.  A closed group social networking account.  So, it would take 5 people in a group to create an account, then to add people at least 3 people would have to invite that person.  To get rid of them, at least 3 people would have to un-invite them. And there would be a maximum number of people, say 20.  The numbers could be different, but the point is that multiple people have to move to accept/kick out a person and there would be limits on how the big the group could get.  People could belong to multiple groups.  This would create an environment for groups of friends to interact. The main concept of Facebook would remain the same: sharing and posting.

There are obvious downsides.  There would be a lot of movement of people going in/out of groups.  It could create cliques, but those already exist.

What do you think?