How Young is Too Young for Social Media?
12 Mar, 2010 | Written by Andrew Krzmarzick | under Generational Diversity
As many of you know, the birth of my first child (a boy!) is imminent. We just crossed the 39-week mark yesterday and we are just buzzing with excitement in the Krzmarzick household.
So I set up a Twitter handle for him already: @WizKidKriz
And, of course, I am planning to create a GovLoop profile for him!
Though Krzmarzick is an unusual name and he probably won’t have much competition for LinkedIn and Facebook names, I am still wondering if I should nail down a social network presence for him.
Do I set up a Gmail account?
Should I start him on FourSquare so he can aspire to prominence as the Mayor of McDonald’s on Main Street in Durham?
I don’t have easy answers to some of these questions.
And they aren’t necessarily trivial.
In fact, Alan Silberberg (@You2Gov) just cautioned me on Twitter:
Granted, I don’t plan to encourage him to be tweeting and posting Facebook updates by the age of 3 or buying him a smart phone at 5 (maybe when he goes to school he’ll need one, though…who needs to do math problems the hard way, eh?) :-)
So what are your thoughts?
How young is too young to get started with social media?
Thank you for visiting the Generation Shift blog! I look forward to interacting with you as we work together to promote the power of four generations, social media and flexible work environments to transform the public and social sectors.
Ari Herzog | March 12th, 2010 at 6:14 pm #
You may be interested in reading an interview I conducted on documenting your child online.
Daniel Rosenberg | March 15th, 2010 at 11:40 am #
This is actually a very popular notion I have noticed lately as the social space proliferates! There was a CNN segment on the topic not long ago too.
I personally think that there is not a “too young” age for social media. Since social media is becoming so ubiquitous in everyone’s daily life, it is just another tool to communicate on multiple levels.
The most important thing is to secure your virtual identity from the get-go at any age. For children especially, privacy is very important insofar as the contact information, posted pictures and anything else that may expose personal information.
Like anything else, the key is understanding the implications and ramifications that may follow anything that may be posted.
As far as securing unique user names, http://www.NameChk.com can help in that process.