Are You Too Old for Myspace?

I am a full-fledged member of Generation X. How can I possibly feel too old for any internet website?

I signed up for Myspace three months ago at the urging of some friends. It didn't take me long to feel like I was the grandmother in the bunch. Surfing around looking for people I went to high school and college with made me realize that I was not as young as I liked to think I was. This has been somewhat of a humbling experience for me. I've always considered myself computer proficient and have been surfing the web since the majority of the current Myspace users were still using pacifiers. Yet, in daily life, I still don't think of myself as old. I'm not 40 yet. I can't be old, can I?

A few days on Myspace told me I was. I clicked on my college alma mater to look for other alumni. I searched several times, yet was not coming up with anyone even close to my age and therefore no one I had known in college. It took more minutes than I care to admit to discover that the maximum default age was set to people born the year I entered junior high. Double yikes. Once for finding out that maneuvering on Myspace was as foreign to me as using a mouse was to my great-grandfather. And twice for discovering that I had to reset the default maximum age in the search parameters.

Once I got a little more comfortable with the format, I learned that Myspace has its own language. My feelings of being young and hip, already a little rumpled, ran, screaming in terror. Not only did I need to learn how to dress my page up, I needed to learn the Myspace language. For example, I was not dressing up my page, I was pimping it. "Thanks for the add," was a comment that I soon got used to seeing as well. It means that the person leaving the comment is thanking me for adding them to my friends list. Then, there are all the acronyms, which have been floating around the internet for years and I always considered myself up to speed on. I soon learned that the younger generation has a whole new set. I suddenly felt too old to even try to figure them out or to care if I did.

Luckily, most of my friends on Myspace, all 13 of them, are in the same boat as me. We laugh at the language and remember that, over the years of communicating on-line, we have created many of our own acronyms. They come out of necessity, so that we don't have to type the same long phrases over and over. Instead of PIR, for parent in room, our acronyms stand for more adult topics. Like MC for miscarriage or BF for breastfeeding. I can understand that each generation has its place on the internet and its own acronyms that reflect the stage of life that we are in at the time. I'm sure in another twenty or thirty years, our acronyms will reflect that stage as well. Maybe WFR for waiting for retirement or JHCS for just had cataract surgery.

Despite the obvious generation gap of Myspace, I plan on sticking around. I can see real benefits to having my own Myspace page. For one, it is a fast way to communicate that is less cluttered than e-mail. My e-mail box is too full of spam for me to enjoy communicating with friends that way anymore. I also enjoy being able to post pictures on Myspace and being able to see pictures of my friends and their children. And, as a parent with a child who is rapidly approaching the teen years, I feel like being familiar with Myspace will give me an inside edge when he does reach that milestone. Though I am sure his generation will have a whole new set of acronyms for me to learn. Maybe by then I will have figured out how to pimp my page.