While businesses use Facebook to network and gain customers and adults use it to contact old friends and to engage in social networking games, teens use Facebook to converse with their friends and make plans with one another. They even use Facebook to insult and bully those they dislike, and carry out their gripes, which has resulted in serious consequences. After upsets with other teens, a teen will unfriend them and more drastically will delete their own profiles and rejoin Facebook starting with a new wall and friends.
Teenagers have their own decorum on Facebook and are adept at creating Facebook Fads within their age group . They create fads such as posting outrageous pictures of themselves showing facial expressions that an adult would discard as a bad picture. The more extreme the shot, the more acceptable for Facebook. Another fad is for Facebook participants to photograph themselves laying down flat and in strange places. This is called planking. One photo showed a teenager laying along side the middle lines painted in a road for example. While dangerous, it fit planking criteria.
A recent Facebook fad amongst teenagers is Facebook marriages. Teenagers marry one another on Facebook and show that they are married in their profile. They do not need to be boyfriend and girlfriend. If they talk a lot on Facebook, this constitutes a reason to marry the person in a Facebook marriage and to show their friend’s photo as their marriage partner. My 15 year old daughter told me not to be shocked if I saw that she was married on Facebook. She told me to disregard her marriage because it is not a real marriage but a Facebook marriage. Her status showed that she was married on Facebook to a boy she only writes to on Facebook. She showed me other marriages among her friends.
The next day my daughter expressed anger over a girl who made accusations about her to her Facebook marriage partner and he divorced her. Not only had my daughter referred to her marriage on Facebook, but when the young man unmarried her on Facebook she expressed anger over his divorcing her and anger at the girl who caused their divorce.
The teenage Facebook encounter differs vastly from an adults experience with Facebook. While adults tend to be by the book, using Facebook in how to style, teenagers use of Facebook is out of the box. They write their own rules, have imparted creative angles to the use of Facebook and they start their own trends and fads. So if your son or daughter is married on Facebook, do not be alarmed. Leave it to teenagers to expand the relationship status to a something imaginative and creative, rending their use of Facebook a fun part of their teenage experience.