My father has recently joined Facebook.

 

image from Odesk

This image largely sums up my attitude towards his joining the social networking giant.

I constantly dread the never-ending questions like “how do i do the picture thing again?” and “how do they know that i know they liked it?”

However, when I stop to think about all the things dad patiently took the time to teach me as I grew up such as how to read or ride a bike, I admittedly feel a little guilt.

Rallying my spirits I sat with him and try to bring him into the world of the networking literate… the grand “digi-age” that I and my peers were seemingly brought into born with almost natural technological know-how.

He was perplexed by the way pages were linked and that fact that clicking any one thing on his timeline would lead him to a new page and different content. He found he accidentally clicked things all the time and became terribly lost.

Good old wikihow had this advice for me “Explain the basics to your senior friend before opening an account.” 

Well all too late for me wiki, dad had a work friend open the account for him.

That aside, our learning journey began with me giving very simple explanations for Facebook’s basic functions.

e.g.

Me: A ‘Like’ is a button you click to indicate to someone that you appreciate their photo/comment or status.

Dad: So they can see I like it?

Me: Yes.

Dad: Do they say something? Can I say something?

and so we moved to comments.

Dad with a lot of patience on my behalf!!!!! can now successfully chat to multiple people at once over chat whilst flicking through his favourite funny pages and upload a photo of his holiday.

Slowly but surely dad is becoming a contributor as much as a consumer.

He explained the struggle of learning this ‘network literacy’ was that it was simply things he had never ever done before and he is accustomed to instructions and steps rather than clicking blindly and hoping it works.

He said the things that seem so obvious and natural to me are terms that never even existed while he was at school or even as he was retiring.