Family 2.0

In  the circles I travel in a lot of technical terms get thrown around lazily.  I won’t get into the detail but I spend my days in the technology centric world of the online team in a telecommunications company so the jargon runs heavy and thick like molasses in a heatwave.  Most of it is nothing more than an acronym used to describe that which could just as easily have been described with the words it represents.  Ironically the laziness is thwarted by the fact that you usually have to explain the acronym to your audience anyway.  Oh well, cultural hazard I guess.

One term that I’m starting to hear isn’t a tech term but is a derivation of the tech term Web 2.0 and it makes a lot sense.  Family 2.0 represents the evolution of the nature of family in this modern connected world.   Given Darwin’s recent anniversary its also a timely topic to discuss.  My family is the poster child for Family 2.o.  I live in Sydney with my wife and newborn baby.  I also have a 13 year old daughter in the US who I see regularly but not often enough. The rest of my family is in the US while my wife’s family is mostly in the Sydney area.  So you can see, in my case , the ‘village’ it takes to raise a family isn’t a village at all, it’s spread out over opposite hemispheres of the globe. 

You may be expecting me to discuss the usual “how we function as a family when we rarely get to be in the same room together” but I don’t think anyone would be surprised by the webcams, skype, instant messenger, Facebook, and iPhone applications that we use to keep in contact.  We do all of that and it does work but thats not what is truly interesting these days.  In fact, I’d be surprised if we are in any way unusual in how we connect and communicate.  THAT is the point.  While my family should be the poster child for Family 2.0 your family probably acts in much the same way. 

Family 2.o is about the evolution of the everyday family.  You don’t have to be spread across the globe to want to keep in touch with your teenager and you certainly don’t need to have any reason at all to post your newborns pictures on your Facebook page.  So the family of today is interconnected in short bursts/tweets/pings/IMs/emails etc. in ways that they never were before even when they saw eachother everyday.  I can just imagine the scene with the whole family sitting around the dinner table (people still do that right?) with their communications devices of choice texting/tweeting/IMing eachother while they shovel spaghetti bolognese into their pie-holes. 

We are not our Parent’s idea of family anymore.  Family 1.0 meant meeting at a certain pre-arranged time and downloading our day to eachother in large single bursts of information.  “What did you do at work/school today dear?”  “Well Honey, I worked on the Schmittstein account” or in the case of your teenager, ” nothin’ why?” Family 2.0 is actually much much better than Family 1.0.  I don’t have to ask my teenager what she did today because I can read all about it on her Facebook page.  I can read her blog and find out who she is hanging out with and what concert she just saw…and did she like it?  I can subscribe to her Twitter Feed and just hear her thoughts, random thoughts, silly thoughts….the thoughts that make her unique.  If my mom had asked me to provide that kind of insight I’d have regressed to single weekly grunts of “yeah its all good” and thats it. 

The best part of Family 2.0 is that it doesn’t just provide you with information, it provides you with converstation starters.  My family now knows exactly what to ask me, what my interests are and what I’m doing about them.  What a great cheat-sheet the web has become for the family! Remember those awkward moments when your Aunt Lucy used to ask “so what are all the cool kids into these days”  well thankfully those days are gone. 

Despite the rantings of desperate and aging right-wing Luddites, technology is not ruining the family.  Your Xbox is not the devil and your iPod will not rot your ears.  The family is alive and well and living in the 21st century.