Big Brother is watching you. And by “brother,” I mean “mother”—if your parents are on social media, like mine are.
We Millennials have given up on Facebook being our exclusive domain, since our parents now use the social media site as much as we do. Parents also love Instagram—but that’s okay with me, because most of my posts involve celebrities, my dog, or Ithaca’s gorges.
For years, Twitter was where I’d turn when I needed to do some serious venting; my profile was an unedited timeline of my life. That’s why I panicked when “@lokosmom”—a.k.a. my mother—started to follow me.
If your parents have a Twitter account, they’re probably just following you, your fifteen best friends, and Ina Garten. So, basically, everything you write they will read. For example: last week I tweeted, half-jokingly, that I planned to have one drink for every internship I was rejected from. Five minutes later, my mom texted me asking just exactly how many drinks I was planning on consuming.
My parents are the typical “helicopter” type. They like to be involved in every aspect of my life; they always want to know where I am, who I’m with, and what I’m doing. Even when I’m not tweeting about a given activity, one of my friends might be—and since my mom follows them, too, I not only have to be careful about what I tweet, but I constantly need to remind my friends not to broadcast the fact that we’re out having fun on a school night.
Still, I think it’s kind of adorable that my mom loves to tweet back and forth with my friends, giving out motherly advice in 140 characters or less. Most of her tweets revolve around enjoying our youth, working hard, and not burning the candle at both ends. My friends love to interact with her—while I’m still stressing out about her being able to follow my collegiate adventures so closely.
But I have to admit that I’m slowly warming up to the idea of my mom being on Twitter. Sure, I can no longer tweet about nights of college debauchery—but I probably shouldn’t publicize that anyway. Twitter allows us to keep up with one another’s lives. I know when she and my dad are smoking cigars on the terrace, when our dog finally got housebroken, and when my dad falls asleep before 8 p.m. These are the little things she may leave out over the phone, but they make me feel like I’m home.
— Courtney Sokol ’15