The dilemma My parents have gone on a long summer holiday and have started writing a weekly round-robin email. It contains the usual update on where they happen to be staying, but also absolutely cringe-worthy “reflections” on what life is like on the continent. Each week they email this out to 20-30 people, including some of my friends. I can’t help but feel they’re making themselves look a bit daft. I don’t really need to hear their take on events like the Barcelona killings from their European vantage point. My brother is equally bemused, but says it’s meant for my parents’ friends and that I should drop it. Is there a way I can tacitly suggest what they’re doing is a bit naff or am I being a spoilsport?

Mariella replies They’d probably think so. They don’t realise that’s there’s only one thing more embarrassing than parents in real life, particularly on the dance floor, and that’s when they take to cyberspace. Then again your parents are not exactly pioneers. We’ve all welcomed the newfound pleasure of opining not just among our inner circle but also out there for the world at large to gorge on. Your parents are merely exercising their right to be heard in the cacophony.

Once upon a time mantelpieces and kitchen corkboards would have been decorated with postcards by the end of the summer from friends and family. Displayed like totems by my parents’ generation, their social status would be derived from the personal missives received on birthdays, public holidays and from those who remembered them while overseas. Nowadays those relics of a postage-dependent world sit mainly on their display stands, decorating the exterior of still hopeful tourist shops, gathering dust. Your parents are on a glamorous European tour and they want the world to know it. It would certainly be spoiling their sport to try to restrain them.

I’ve found that the best way to deal with what I don’t find palatable is to delete before reading

I’ve found that the best way to deal with what I don’t find palatable is to delete before reading. Communications can be sent, but they don’t have to opened. There are those who decry the echo chamber we nowadays have the opportunity to inhabit, where we hear only our own thoughts returned by those like-minded souls who have embraced our online presence, but sometimes there is comfort to be had in believing the world shares your sensibilities. Once upon a time we had a public persona, displayed to the outside world at work or at play but always in tangible proximity to each other. Now we have the privilege of our online avatars, leading the lives we want the world to see. It’s not always our best reflection. I’ve deleted the Instagram app twice already this summer, so despondent did I feel about my friends’ priorities as illustrated in posts and my own grey life in comparison.

As for that multigenerational connection, my children’s friends follow me, I follow as many of them as will allow me without issuing a restraining order and so it goes on. I’m always flattered when their pals request to “friend” me although I’m realising its not about me at all, but simply another vantage point from which to view their mates’ activities. My attempts at #humour may raise groans of derision from my offspring, but we all want to be in on the act.

The internet has allowed us the privilege of expanding our social circle to ever greater numbers and it’s not just the younger generation who have developed a taste for measuring their popularity by the number of likes they can accrue. These aren’t your real parents but upwardly mobile avatars. You can assert autonomy from their worldview. Like the rest of us crowding the interactive space of personal communication they have their own idea of who they want to play in their Second Life online. It may not reflect the elements of their personalities that you best relate to but in an analogue world it would be the “self” they displayed to their friends and colleagues.

Your brother is right when he says it’s not meant for you. The parents you connect with are the ones you grew up with, your relationship defined by the dynamics of your family. Cyber-parents are an altogether different breed, exposing full frontal the personalities they adopt among their contemporaries and the wider world beyond their front door. From an anthropological point of view it could be seen as a gift, a glimpse of the adults who raised you in all their multifaceted glory, or if you insist on shouldering responsibility, an embarrassment!

My choice would be to accept that they’re not simply the people who raised you but adults with their own unique (and at times unpalatable) thoughts, tastes, desires and opinions, many of which, in a different generation, you would never have been privy to. Celebrate their diversity or block their round robins. The choice is yours.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1