Photo by Matt Petosa

Sherian Simpson doesn’t trust the Internet. Never has. These days, she finds herself logging on almost daily to Animal Crossing: City Folk, where players can meet up with friends or strangers to virtually shop, garden, and go about a virtual life in a virtual world. Most often, Simpson will meet up there with one or more of her eight grandchildren.

Simpson, who lives in Arlington, Texas, can instantly “have over,” as she calls it, her grandchildren who live in Las Vegas, Houston and Austin. It’s all done with an Internet connection, a Nintendo Wii video game system and her television. In fact, she and the kids not only play together virtually, but also speak to each other in real time through the WiiSpeak microphone.

“It’s a great way to visit,” Simpson says. “For some reason, being a cartoon character on a TV screen is a sweeter, more natural communication. The children can in passing talk about their problems, and you can say how you used to handle those situations and things like that. It’s just a very nice connection, very clean, very safe.”

A booming market

Simpson isn’t alone in using the Internet to stay connected. In fact, hundreds of millions now regularly log on to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, to name just a couple, and connect with family and friends. On these social networks, users fill out profiles with information about themselves and then add, befriend or follow other users of the network. This means they can see the information their connections post on their profiles, and vice versa.

The popularity of these sites is staggering, and they continue to grow. In a February post to the Facebook Blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg put the number of his site’s users in perspective: “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.” Yet this analogy is already outdated. Since February, Facebook membership has surpassed 200 million people, more than all but four countries.

Furthermore, the largest growth on Facebook, MySpace and other sites is coming not from tech-savvy teens, but rather their moms, dads and grandparents. A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the number of adults on social networks more than quadrupled, from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2008. In fact, more adults overall are using social networks today than teens. While Facebook doesn’t reveal specific demographic data, Inside Facebook, an independent blog that covers Facebook activity, reported in February that the number of women over 55 who use the site had grown by 175.3 percent since September 2008. (Male users in that age group increased by 137.8 percent.)

Additionally, Facebook’s advertising site estimates that there are now more than 4 million users between the ages of 45 and 65 in the United States alone. Some sites, like Eons (akin to Facebook in style and purpose), are solely for boomers. AARP’s own online community, geared to the 50-plus population, invites users to converse on a range of topics, including dogs, car problems and the single life; and added more than 100,000 new members in the first three months of 2009.

Not many forms of media are shared by so many generations. You don’t exactly see Grammy, Mom and her angsty teen all gathering around the television set to watch the latest episode of 90210, for example, but you will find them all social networking.

Rupert Nacoste, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University specializing in social psychology, attributes the surge in popularity of social networks to our modern lives. Basically, he argues that in today’s increasingly diverse world people are less sure of how they fit in—and, as a result, don’t take the social risks necessary to make friends. Social networking offers a safe, easy way for people to make connections without really having to take risks.

“You can ask a person a question face to face, but if you do that, you have to deal with what he might say, how he might react, and how he might look at you,” explains Nacoste. “You don’t have to worry about dealing with any of this if you are on a social network.”

It seems perfectly natural, then, that this easy form of communication would fit into the busy lives of every generation. However, while teens and young adults may be the most loyal and regular visitors to their Facebook or MySpace accounts, it’s adults who weave social networking into every aspect of their personal, family and professional lives. Older Americans, the newest social networkers of the bunch, are logging on to stay connected—and discovering a whole new world.

Serving your social side

The biggest use of social networks is, well, to be social. Ninety-one percent of teens say they use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends and 89 percent of adults use them for the same reason, according to Pew.

For many, keeping in touch online saves time and energy. “Social networking gives me more options for communicating with people,” says 15-year-old Facebook and MySpace user Ruthie Schorr. “It’s not as time-consuming as calling all the people I need to catch up with.”

The classic notion of a teen having a phone glued to her ear may soon be a thing of the past. Even a fairly new form of communication, e-mail, is starting to lose some ground with this group, too. In 2004, 89 percent of teens reported using e-mail, but today this number is down to 73 percent, according to the Generations Online, a 2009 report from Pew. Additionally, Internet consumer research firm Nielsen reports that using social networks has now taken over as the fourth most common online activity across all groups, with e-mail coming in fifth. (Not surprisingly, using a “search” function takes the number one spot.)

Staying in touch with the kids

Parents are also interested in being social online, an interest that seems to have stemmed from their kids. “The number one application of social networking for my wife and me is to keep connected with the kids,” says Andrew Schorr, the founder of Patient Power, a Seattle-based health website, and Ruthie’s dad. “Two of our kids are quite a distance from home, so for them and for our youngest, who’s still here, it’s just to see what’s going on with them, just to be in their world.”

To Nacoste, this makes sense: “Parents now have less contact points with their children in our busy lives. Where else are the structured points where you can have contact with your child? It turns out they’re online.”

This interest in connecting with the younger generation holds true for grandparents as well. According to Pew, only 7 percent of Internet users over 65 are on social networks, compared with 65 percent of teens and 30 percent of adults 35 to 44 years old. But when the over-65 users are online they have a strong interest in finding out what’s going on with their children and grandchildren.

Matt Meeker, the founder of Meetup.com, a social network where users connect with groups of like-minded people, recently launched a new social networking site called Wee-Web. Here, new parents can invite friends and family to view photos, videos and read mini updates about their children. According to Meeker, the most active users of Wee-Web, surprisingly, aren’t the parents.

“Our most active users by far and away are grandparents,” says Meeker. “We see them viewing every photo that’s posted, watching every video, leaving comments and signing their names. It’s really cool to watch them get involved.”

The potential for developing avid social networkers out of grandparents certainly exists, especially if the network involves photographs of family. In fact, some users in this group might just be getting started. “I’ll go onto Facebook maybe once a week,” explains Ethel Taft, Ruthie’s grandmother. “[My son-in-law] will tell me when there are pictures posted, and that’s the only time I’ll go.”

Indeed, the idea that only teens are engaging in activities like photo uploads and viewing videos on social networking sites “is a common misperception,” according to Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, a firm that measures Internet activity. Dougherty notes that these applications are growing in popularity rather than leveling off as the sites becomes more popular with an older audience, implying the more mature crowd is picking up these applications right away.

One of the driving forces behind this adaptation, perhaps, is need: Adults are networking professionally.

Getting down to business

Connecting professionally is especially important to today’s adults who may have lost their jobs or are worried that they soon may. Many are choosing the increasingly popular Twitter. This social network allows users to post 140-character responses to the question “What are you doing?”—a topic broad enough to open the floodgates of news, opinion, social marketing (basically, professional networking online) and more. Recently, members of Congress showed us how it’s done by reminding their constituents they were still at work by posting “tweets” from their cellphones during President Obama’s Feb. 24th address to Congress. Others are using social networks to market their own, personal “brands.”

“I’ve made a ton of connections on Twitter,” says Cari Shane Parven, a writer in the Washington, D.C., area. “You’re reaching out to people you don’t know, and because of that, you can meet so many more people.” In fact, one of Shane Parven’s connections on Twitter resulted in a job referral. She asked her network if anyone knew anything about a particular organization that had posted it was looking for writers. A fellow writer whom she knows only through Twitter gave her an “in” that helped her land the job.

According to Nacoste, social marketing is a natural phenomenon to come out of social networking. “Now it makes the most sense to market yourself online, because that’s where everybody is,” explains Nacoste. “You go where the audience has eyes and ears, that’s how marketing works.”

Business networking and socializing have always gone hand in hand so it makes sense for these worlds to merge on the Web. Additionally, there are now social networking sites like LinkedIn that are devoted specifically to connecting professionals.

“I see LinkedIn as an adult place where you don’t fool around,” says Shane Parven. “It’s kind of like the stacks of the library at college—you go there for serious study, not to chat with your friends. Facebook is more like the social part of the library where everybody walks by and you’re not really getting any homework done.”

This more serious side of social networking seems to be serving those adults who know how to use it. LinkedIn regularly posts “success stories” of how people have beaten the battered economy to find connections and jobs through the site. These stories range from how the vice president of sales and business development at Buddy Media brought in over $2 million in revenue, to how one user’s profile was discovered by a CEO who then reached out to her to offer her a job.

Whether it’s to meet the next boss, stay connected to the grandchildren, or check in on a daughter’s life, millions of people have found real value on social networks. They’re here to stay. Plus, plain and simple, meeting up online can make life easier. As Sherian Simpson says about playing Animal Crossing with her grandkids: “It’s a nice way to have them over. … It’s one of those visits you don’t have to clean your house up for.” And there’s just no arguing the convenience of that.

Alisa Stoudt is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.