On the morning of his 13th birthday, my son finally joined Facebook.  Within a few hours his friend count rivaled mine. 

Facebook is extremely popular among seventh graders.  The rules require an account holder to be at least 13 years of age.  However, some other parents apparently look the other way and allow their children to join before they officially become a teenager.

I consider myself lucky that my son doesn’t mind being Facebook friends with me.  This experience has been educational. 

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that teens treat online information with a much greater sense of irony and lightheartedness than adults.  It’s popular to create fan groups for ridiculous concepts in order to make friends laugh.  In addition, it’s extremely common to list friends as relatives.  In other words, one friend might be designated as your father, another as your cousin, etc.  It’s all a joke.  Isn’t that the kind of thing you would have used Facebook for at that age?  Of course you would have.

From a research perspective, the key lesson I draw from these observations is that we need to be vigilant not to look at teen social network data in the same way we look at similar information about adults.  Question everything from age, to family relationships, to interests.  If you look at it without the intended sense of irony, you will draw incorrect conclusions.