"But isn't there something a bit creepy about all this?"<p>No. There's something creepy about a culture which seems to believe you should only befriend people your own age, and that anything more than 15% either way makes you a pervert.<p>I do think, however, that you need to be careful what you say. I remember playing Half Life online about 8 years ago, and I caught myself using the same profanities I would use amongst friends at our weekly LAN party. What might be a perfectly innocent profanity to me ;) might raise a few questions if other players were particularly young, and I had no way to know, so I reigned it in a bit. Social networks could easily lead to similar misunderstandings.
As I see it, it's the American media that has conditioned people to think that any interaction between an adult and a child not related to them is suspect.<p>This is terribly sad. When I was 14, I would have loved to be able to talk to a real scientist.<p>Is this exclusively an American problem?
31 is not old age, and I hope when I get to 31 I have 20 year old girl friends :)<p>However, in the real world it is hard to socialise with people who are not in the same age group as you are for many practical reasons e.g. try going to bars with people who are minors in your group.<p>Primarily it seems we are indoctrinated by the nature of the societies we live in which seems to teach us it is not good to associate with people much older/younger than you. This seems to be an issue that starts from even the early days of education where the difference is small (in most schools, hanging out with people more than 1 or 2 grades above/below you is often considered weird by the peer groups).<p>However, online it is more to do with shared interests, ability, and many other factors rather than age. Age does not matter. Cases in point: Who knows the ages of the people we interact with on HN - does it matter? All the startups, in past and present cycles (e.g. soccernet.com, facebook.com) created by very young people - did the users/ buyers/advertisers (most of whom are in different age groups) know or care about this?
Yes that does move the old weird-o-meter up a bit.<p>I think what's missing is a social trust structure and a goal-based relationship. After all, we see these types of relationships everywhere -- Big Brother/Big Sisters, Boy Scouts, Youth Religious Groups, Mentoring relationships in school and college, etc.<p>But there's always some kind of goal, and some kind of trust structure built by society to protect (or at least try to protect) the innocent. Now with the net we probably have 9-year-olds chatting up 60-year-olds on the virtues of various sex practices. It's out of whack.<p>I know I was in a chat system a couple of weeks ago in a room that was politics and "R" rated. (Hey -- politics is always R-Rated!) I got a "hey there" IM from a person with a nickname of "April 14, 1939". We started chatting, and it took about 20 minutes for me to figure out it was a 12-year-old using god-knows-who's nickname. (The bad grammar and vocabulary were a hint)<p>I know I was uncomfortable. I told the kid he should use sites with his own age group. I also chided him on his poor grammar and vocabulary and told him we'd talk some other time (we didn't).<p>It's weird and it's uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong -- I'm sure there are good things that can come out of these relationships. Kids need role models. Adults usually have been through a lot of the problems that kids are going to face and can help out a lot. But gee -- you get these "ambush" friendship deals...<p>I think there's a great potential for good here. I also think there is something very wrong going on. I am reminded of the observation made when TV came out -- it used to be there were "adult" conversations and "kid" conversations, ie, conversations were adjusted based on the audience. With TV, everybody was downstairs in the kitchen late at night talking with all the grown-ups: even if we were only 4. The net takes this context-free-communication thorn up to the next level: chatting bi-directional communication.<p>Yuck.
A 31 year old guy working in Silicon Valley needs to get over feeling creepy about being friends with 20 year olds. In the future he'll be working for one of them.
From Oxford Dictionary: Friend - a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations.<p>Developing mutual affection takes time. Clearly, technology has taken this word 'friend' (and many of it's variants) and has - to use the new parlance - mashed it up. Of course, words and meanings evolve but technology has created social platforms that leave behind words and meanings that were shaped over decades and centuries. There's a dissonance between who we think is a 'friend' and what a social platform thinks is a 'friend'. The context is new, the rules are not well established, and the words are awfully inadequate.<p>I agree with Mr Gray, btw. It is creepy. But, this is quite normal where technology is busy pushing the boundaries.
Being a geek and an Internet geek at that he should be more accepting of people no matter their age. As long as they bring /something/ to the table it makes sense for them to be in your list of "friends". Curiously, IvanB is also on my list (Twitter,Plurk,IM), he's 18, I'm 27 with two kids, no big deal ... he's a Digg/social website animal (good to know for a publisher) and I also helped him try to land a gig at Mixx.
I'm 35 and a few years ago I dated a 20 year old. Was that creepy? Not at all. I followed the campsite rule.<p><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/savage/campsiterule" rel="nofollow">http://www.thestranger.com/savage/campsiterule</a>
When I was 6 a nice man down the street gave me my first coca cola and showed me his Pete Rose rookie and baseball card collection <i>without molesting me</i>! Should I be offended?
I totally understand what this guy is trying to explain. I get invites from folks that were in diapers when I graduated high school, and I always feel that I have to be careful how I interact with them. This is especially true for girls. For boys, it's really not a big deal because there are plenty of ways for younger and older men to have entirely appropriate relationships.<p>Not so much for girls. Even if I were single, I think I'd have to be careful with girls, and more careful as the age gets lower. Girls tend to bond with and be attracted to male affection, and the ideal source for that is their own father (assuming the father is on the up-and-up) even through a time of courtship (courtship is about making the transition from a father's affection to a mate's affection). It would be entirely inappropriate for me as a grown man to allow a non-adult girl to have misplaced bonding because of my affections, even if they were entirely innocent.<p>Since I'm married, this is a double no-no. The reasons above still apply, but now since I have now vowed my affections exclusively to my wife, there are very few relationships with other women (particularly young ones) that are appropriate. Work relationships qualify as appropriate, obviously, but independent friendships have to be very carefully considered.
I read books, papers and attend lectures by people much older than me. How is following those people's twitter feeds any different (other than probably being a waste of time)?