The world now belongs to the generation below mine

This gap between the Facebook/non-Facebook generation is wider than the gap between my generation and our parents, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

LAST WEDNESDAY at breakfast, my generation discovered that our time is up. I got wind of the news on Tuesday by reading it online but, like most people my age, I never entirely believe something until I see it printed on a large sheet of paper, anachronistically delivered to my door by the paper boy.

So for me, the penny did not drop until Wednesday morning that the world now belongs to the generation below mine.

At the bottom of the front page of the Financial Timesit said that Facebook is now bigger than Google.

In the US, more people now visit the social networking site to write on each other’s walls and swap pictures of drunken japes at parties than turn to Google to get travel directions, check the spelling of “definitely” or search for internet porn.

Social networking, it seems to me, is the biggest separator of the young from the not-so-young. In most other respects there is not much to choose between people of 50 and of 15, apart from a bit of experience and a great many wrinkles.

Everyone wears jeans. More or less everyone (quite) likes Florence and the Machine. But 15-year-olds live on Facebook, while 50-year-olds don’t understand it at all.

This isn’t a small thing: it’s a ginormous non-meeting of minds between two generations over what is not just a different way of communicating, but a different way of living. Google is natural for old people because we were taught how to look things up at primary school.

It is like a library only a lot better: you don’t have to get on a bus, and the thing you want is never out on loan to someone else.

E-mail is natural for us, too. We might still grapple with the right stylistic flourishes for this flat medium, but we understand the principle perfectly. One person communicates with another, only it happens faster than a postman takes to drop a letter through a door.

My generation can even do Twitter, at a pinch. Twitter is just a sort of showing off, and we are just as good at that as anyone born a decade or two after us.

But Facebook remains deeply alien. For us, the point about communicating is that it is a consensual activity between two people. I like to talk to one friend at a time, which allows you to vary the tone and content to suit the person to whom you are talking.

When we deal with more than one or two friends at a time, we get in a flap. Think of the kerfuffle that goes into deciding who to invite with whom to a dinner party.

By contrast, the idea that communication becomes a random broadcast to 500 “friends” about what you were up to last night is perfectly incomprehensible.

As is the thought that you park yourself for hours on end in front of a screen gawping at the random communications of your unmanageably large group of friends and commenting on them.

This gap between the Facebook/non-Facebook generation is wider than the gap between my generation and our parents.

My dad liked Verdi, I liked the Rolling Stones. He thought mine was noise, I thought his was weird.

But it was the same 12in circle of vinyl going round on the turntable, and listening to it involved sitting on the same sofa.

My mother would not throw any food away, and while I did not admire the half a roast potato sitting in the fridge, I understood that she had lived through rationing and was therefore constitutionally incapable of chucking it out.

I have asked my children to explain Facebook to me, but I’m none the wiser. They can’t explain it because they don’t understand what I’m asking. The scale of my puzzlement makes no sense to them.

Whether or not we see the point of it, my generation is going to have to sign up in time. A friend of my daughter’s recently complained that because her grandfather wasn’t on Facebook, she couldn’t wish him a happy birthday.

The thought of picking up the phone, let alone buying a card, had not occurred to her. Last week’s news makes it clear. If in the future we want to get birthday cards (or communicate with anyone under 40) we are going to have to join Facebook whether we understand it or not.

There is only one risk to the site, as far as I can see. Last week, I read that 36 million mothers in the US had signed up to keep an eye on their children.

Having your mother as your Facebook “friend” would surely put as much of a damper on the whole jag as being chaperoned at the disco by your father. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)