I’ve been an avid user of the social net­work­ing Web site Facebook since the end of my senior year in high school, but I never thought I would be Facebook friends with my own mother.

It’s an inter­est­ing tran­si­tion fil­ter­ing my face­book and chang­ing pri­vacy set­tings for the even­tual and hope­ful suc­ces­sion into pro­fes­sional rep­re­sen­ta­tion of myself. News reports have recently stated that as many as 45 per­cent of employ­ers scope out appli­cants on face­book before con­tin­u­ing inter­view pro­ce­dures. I’m active in mov­ing infor­ma­tion and pho­tos to appro­pri­ate aspects of my social net­work­ing per­sona. My new twit­ter dis­plays no mate­r­ial that may be viewed as offen­sive or less than exem­plary for this very rea­son. I wouldn’t want any­one get­ting the wrong impres­sion of me.

But, face­book reports that there are more than 250 mil­lion active users and the fastest grow­ing demo­graphic is peo­ple 35 years of age and older.

My mother is 35 years of age or older and now she has a face­book. Her jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to me was that she wanted to stay in touch with her friends. My mother’s friends are on face­book too?! Regardless, I am con­fi­dent her jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to her­self was likely some­thing relat­ing to want­ing to keep tabs on two of her sons, one of whom(not me) is in Spain for a semes­ter abroad.

The idea of block­ing cer­tain con­tent, like my fac­book sta­tus, from my mother feels like I am keep­ing a secret from her. She prob­a­bly doesn’t need to know that I am watch­ing “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at 2 a.m. when I should be sleep­ing or study­ing or doing any­thing else.

But it’s pos­si­ble that my mother is help­ing me indi­rectly to pre­pare for my future. With 45 per­cent of employ­ers scop­ing out their appli­cants on face­book before con­tin­u­ing the inter­view process, it’s impor­tant to put your best dig­i­tal foot­print for­ward. Suddenly, Mom has helped me do more then wipe the schmutz from my face. She has helped me to wipe the schmutz from my face­book. Those pic­tures of my friends and I in our inap­pro­pri­ate Halloween cos­tumes have van­ished and I am the up and com­ing pro­fes­sional that all of the bosses want to hire.

My mother might actu­ally be the rea­son I get a job in the future. She may be a bit too intru­sive and she might con­tinue to ask me why I don’t have a girl­friend, (not that she doesn’t do that already any­way), but she might have prompted me to reeval­u­ate what con­tent my friends and I decide is web post worthy.

She is my mother and she is my face­book friend, but she might just be an excel­lent career adviser too.