âI JUST donât like you sharing personal information with strangers,â my mother said.  The year: 1993. My transgression: writing funny little essays about music and my life, photocopying them in my high schoolâs media center, stapling them into booklets and mailing them to readers in exotic places like Illinois and Oregon. I was two years away from discovering the Internet, but thanks to Sassy magazine, an indie music magazine for teenage girls, I had discovered the world of zines â blogs on paper, if a modern reference is required here.  I sneaked the first few issues out of the house without my parentsâ knowledge, but soon it became impossible to hide the amount of mail I received, some of it addressed to Kelp, which was my zineâs title.  My father was amused; my mother immediately began fretting about my privacy. I appealed to her sense of reason. Yes, I put my real name, return address and personal information in each issue, but at the time, we lived on a Rural Free Delivery route in central Maine. The odds of a creep finding me in person were low.  Besides, the people who read my zine werenât creeps. There was a professor in Boston, a college student in Florida, a writer in New York who worked on VH1âs âPop-Up Video,â and hundreds of teenagers like me, anxious for connection beyond the suffocating walls of small-town high schools. They read what I wrote and they wrote back. We were a community bound by shared interests and first-class stamps, and I was unwilling to abandon my hobby simply because, in theory, someone could trace our R.F.D. number and figure out who, or where, I was.  My mother proposed a compromise. I could continue sharing personal information with strangers only if I used my fatherâs office address for sending zine-related mail. I rolled my eyes and obliged.  Times change, and moms change. Years after I published the final issue of my zine, she signed up for a Facebook account, which she uses to communicate with far-flung family members, but also to post witty remarks about everything from political issues to the Earl Grey at her favorite local tea shop.  Like many Facebook users, she is careful to monitor her privacy settings, but so far, her concerns have not prevented her from uploading photographs of trips sheâs taken and her dogâs antics at home. She is pleased when people comment on her updates, having learned the thrill of writing something and getting a response.  A few years later, she made the next leap â to Twitter. Her first update in 140 characters or fewer: âI am trying to figure out if there is any reason to use this.â She stuck with it, and when the 2012 election season rolled round, she joined other politics junkies as a regular user of the service, following the daily news cycle via her timeline, weighing in with opinions and making deft use of hashtags, which helped her posts reach a wider audience.  Then, one afternoon, she sent me a fateful text message: âI want more Twitter followers. I think my last two posts were not bad.â  Whatâs a dutiful daughter to do? I logged on to my own Twitter account and asked everyone who follows me â a mix of friends, acquaintances and total strangers â to follow my mom.
Once, my mother thought I was oversharing by putting my name on the zine I published from my bedroom. Now sheâs all over Twitter.