Different Pokes for Different Folks

While I was doing some research for my thesis (one page written, YAY!) /killing myself now... I tripped across The Parent Chronicles.

Keywords return the most interesting hits.

Anyway, the site offers advice to parents who are trying to communicate with, relate to and understand their kids. Cool. The video on the home page is a definite must-see for those seeking a clarification of the word "clueless."

After I watched the video, I clicked on the TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF YOUR TEEN'S WORLD quiz. As I always do on these teen slang quizzes, I scored 100. Dunno if that's a good thing or not. I admit, however, to tripping up a bit on one item:




Huh?

Okay, not huh to the terminology, but huh to the choice of definitions. I knew the question was addressing Facebook, but the choices didn't correlate to what I understood to be an everyday poke.

I thought this through....

"Well," I thought to myself. "Poking really isn't 'text messaging,'" (although an argument does exist for it to be considered as such). "It's not a new term for a teen's car, at least not in our lexicon...it's not really an online form of flirtation in the general sense, but it *could be* a rude way to get someone's attention in class."

Hmmmmm....

Since the Parent Chronicles site discusses the perils of online communication, I figured it had to be C) An online form of flirtation, so I chose C).



Facebook.com encourages its users to interpret the poke in different ways, but it is generally considered a form of online flirtation.

O RLY?

Sooo.....according to the response on this quiz, I have flirted with my BIL (yuk), my students (EEK), my colleagues (uhhhh) and my kids (ACK).

In addition to being an active Facebook user, studying social networking sites (SNS) has pretty much consumed my life for the last four or five months, and I didn't remember seeing anything about a poke generally being considered a form of online flirtation. Did I miss a memo? Had I been committing some type of inappropriate action online? Is my BIL going to make a move on me? Would I soon receive a cease-and-desist order from a student's parent?

Thinking that maybe the Facebook community was in on something that I apparently just_didn't_get, I decided to do a quick informal search.

The first hit I clicked on was an article by Kira Shewfelt in the Daily News Egypt defines the poke as a form of affection, where the interpretation is left to the relationship between the poker and the pokee. This Letter to the Editor is a response to someone who complained about "Promiscuous Poking," evidently the crime of over-poking somebody, an offense mentioned here, in Yahoo! Answers.

Okay, normally, I wouldn't take Yahoo! Answers seriously, but in My Search for Meaning (of the Poke), I found the varied Yahoo! responses to be representative of what I understand to be the definition of a poke, which is that the definition shifts depending on context (relationship) and content (type of poke) There's a huge difference between an everyday poke to a friend or an acquaintance and a "throw an apple bottom at" Super Poke.

Pokes permutate, if you will.

Even Facebook doesn't exactly know what a poke is:

"A poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings."


So why, I wonder, would a site like Parent Chronicles, whose goal appears to be bridging the divide between teens and their parents, burn a huge hole in that bridge by delivering the message that "a poke is generally considered to be a form of online flirtation?"