Finally, a Fabulous Guide to Facebook!

Huzzah, it's the Facebook Etiquette Manual we've all been waiting for!

ahahahahahahahahahaha (more advice columns about facebook)

This just makes me laugh. Welcome to my life, a little advice-seeker:

Dear Miss Manners: With the use of online chatting and social networks like Facebook, some people feel comfortable sharing their current state of mind on away messages or status messages. For instance, a friend of mine had the following message up: “The misery just doesn’t end. Yet another bad week.” Another friend had this message up: “Good to know I’ve found the person I might be ready to settle down with.”

When I asked the first friend why she was having a bad week, she said that “things” have been happening lately. I tried to get a little more information from her, but realized she wasn’t really providing me with any, so I backed off and just told her I hope things would get better.

She later mentioned in the online conversation that I was not a good “conversationalist.”Am I supposed to beg people for information from now on?

As for my friend who thought announcing a soon-to-be fiancee was an appropriate thing to do on Facebook, I tried asking him about his status as well. His response was that he would prefer to keep things on the “down low” for now and that his status message was not an invitation for people to pry into his business.

Am I going crazy here, or are people really sending mixed signals? It seems to me that some people purposely try to get you to ask them questions, but when you do, they brush you off or act like YOU are the one prying into their business, even when they opened the door in the first place. Why is it so hard to be a good friend these days? Help!

Gentle Reader: Your friends are turning into virtual friends. That is, they want to advertise their every move and feeling to a presumably rapt and admiring audience but do not want to participate in the give and take of actual friendship.

The model for this, as Miss Manners is not the first to observe, is the celebrity. They “do” publicity through trusted chroniclers—in this case themselves—but are huffy about their “privacy” when they manage to attract someone’s interest, which must be seldom enough.

So to continue your admirable concern for friends, Miss Manners is afraid you must note whether their confidences are being made to you as a friend or the wide world of virtual so-called friends who are not expected to show interest. Or you could make new friends with people who value real friendship.

I find it fascinating and telling that so many people feel compelled to write to advice columnists begging for guidance on how to conduct themselves online. I think it shows that things like facebook are now part of mainstream culture (notice that newspaper articles about it now rarely include the formerly-requisite apposition ", a social networking site where users find and communicate friends through a public profile,") but that they're still so new, there are no accepted "rules." Or at least, as in any foreign culture, the subtleties aren't apparent to the newcomers. I wonder how long it takes for a new mode of communication to become institutionalized in a way that people feel comfortable with "the rules."

I wonder how long it took with the telephone, like, that Americans answer with "Hello" (unless you're my dad and you answer with "SPEAK") and Italians with "pronto" and CSI people with their last name only, and that to call after 9 p.m. is officially questionable, unless it's a really good friend for a really good reason. This could be someone's sociology/anthropology dissertation. You don't even have to credit me.

Facebook: Turning the other [Virtual] Cheek

Facebook seems to come up a lot lately in the columns....in particular for those who are just coming to it this year (or last year, or what have you...). For many of us who have been on the 'book for four or five years already, it prevents the post-college (or for the next generation, post-high school) drift from ever happening. But for my parents' peers, or even my aunt's (she's 14 years older than me), there's a huge rush of reconnecting going on. And many people have questions about how best to approach "friending" those they know they hurt or were otherwise rude to, usually with the intention of making amends. (Equally common is the issue of being friended by someone who you hoped you'd never hear from or see again). Prudence addresses this issue in her column today but, unfortunately, it's fairly clear that she herself has never used Facebook:

Dear Prudie,I am the flip-side of your letter last week from Bliss in Exile. Many years ago, when I was in high school, I did something very cruel to a friend of mine: I took her boyfriend. Now we are both married to other men. I found her on Facebook and attempted to contact her to apologize for the cruel thing I had done. She took your advice and hit "ignore." I feel terrible that I was not even given the opportunity to admit to her that what I did was wrong and try to make amends. I also feel a little angry because I think it is immature to hold a grudge or resentment for so long over something that a teenager once did to you. Now that I have been ignored by the person I would like to apologize to, should I just let it go? Or should I take another avenue to try to contact her to tell her how sorry I am?
—Blocked

Dear Blocked,
In response to Bliss in Exile, I have heard from several people who were the miscreants in high school and have successfully used Facebook to contact their victims and make amends. But the problem with simply making a friend request to someone you've hurt is that the person on the other end has no idea about your intentions. In cases such as yours, it's a better idea to use your Facebook network to get an address for your former classmate and write a letter explaining that what you did has weighed on you all these years, you are asking for forgiveness, and that you want to reconnect. Give your phone number and e-mail address and add you'd also be happy to be contacted through Facebook. If you don't hear anything, just be glad you did the right thing now, and accept that there are some people for whom high-school graduation was one of the happiest days of their lives.
—Prudie

There are two major flaws with this response--first is that when sending a friend request, you DO have the option of including a personal message to explain who you are and why you're seeking a connection with the recipient. Second is that, for people who restrict their profiles to be visible only by their friends, or at least limit the information visible to non-friends in our network (which I think, and hope, is most of us) you can't just snag someone's address off of Facebook unless they've already accepted your friendship, even then only if they've chosen to post it....my full address is not listed on my facebook profile. If you want their address, without feeling like you're creeping on them, try....smartpages.com?

Ultimately, leaving this mistakes aside, I agree with Prudence. Reaching out might be a nice gesture. But jeez, people, learn to take a hint! This happens all the time in the columns, with facebook, with email, with voicemail..."Dear Prudence, I've sent twelve emails and left 8 messages and the person has not responded. Do you think it would be inappropriate of me to show up at their house?"

Also, for this woman in particular...SHE is the one continuing to make a big deal out of what happened so long ago, not her friend. My experience with high school boyfriend drama is that, 20 years later (or, um, five) nobody cares! Stealing her boyfriend may have been the best thing she could have done for this woman, in terms of removing the wrong guy, and a disloyal friend, from the circle of people she chose to associate with. People who think they are "owed" the opportunity to make amends--especially this many years later to people who probably don't care--need to get over themselves.

Just because you CAN find someone doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Inbox Overload

I'm always surprised at how common letters like this one are:

Dear Amy: I agree with "Curious in California," who doesn't understand why people flood others with forwarded e-mail.

Every day I have to wade through jokes, alerts, political diatribes and chain letters from people who copied their entire address book.

I have ceased giving my e-mail address to some family members to avoid the inevitable deluge. I wish my husband would adopt the same practice.

He spends most evenings reading these items because he doesn't have the heart to just delete them. Consequently, we hardly ever have a conversation beyond the dinner table. — Frustrated in Oregon

I don't know....I just don't really encounter this problem anymore....or if I do, I don't notice it. Five or seven years ago, I remember getting tons of chain letters and forwards and giant animated religious and political messages....but people don't forward this stuff to me anymore. Interestingly, I think it occurs more among my parents and people their age--my peers seem to have cooled off with this kind of thing.

Or, perhaps, they've just transferred their energies for mass distribution of jokes, pictures, etc. to Facebook, MySpace, etc.. That's probably true....and I guess that's not a bad thing, because it seems easier to ignore there. In the facebook world, it's less that you're sticking others with pictures, stories, jokes and messages they don't want, and more that you're posting it to your OWN area....it's up to others to read if they want. That seems just, somehow, if only because when you post something really annoying, you have to look at it, too.

This is not to say that I get only personal emails directed specifically to me giving me information that I need/want. I delete 20+ emails a day, most of them from my school and sent to all students, containing information that doesn't apply to me, or that I simply don't have the time and energy to process.

It's tempting for me to say to these folks who get so fed up with pointless emails that it's just like junk mail! You don't have to read it. A response is not expected (why DO people want the same poem they just sent you to be sent back to them, anyway?). It's not personal--but that's probably hard to grasp when the email comes in from your brother, aunt, cousin, or colleague because it clearly SEEMS personal.

It just makes me a little crazy that these people write in as if they are the only ones dealing with this situation. To me it seems comparable to saying "Every time I commute to my job during rush hour, traffic is terrible! This is so annoying! How do you recommend that I tell others not to use the road during my time? What can I do?"

Information overload is annoying, but everyone is dealing with it....so just....deal. Start to pay attention to who sends you funny stuff and who sends you annoying stuff and read or delete accordingly. Or block certain addresses from your inbox. Or go through all new messages and delete anything with a [Fwd] in front of it before you even start reading. Or ask your friend to remove you from her list. Or respond with really rude, angry messages to the people who send you junk. There are as many ways to deal with annoying emails as there are people. This is just a part of life now. The information superhighway is as crowded as I-90....so find a way to avoid it, accept it, or alter it.

Miss Manners 2.0

Today's problem, I imagine, is one Miss Manners never expected she'd have to handle. And she does it rather well, I must say. She maintains her staid, self-consciously old-fashioned tone while talking about (possibly scandalous) facebook pics, which reads a bit funny at first but ultimately is a credit to her versatility, I think. I guess good manners really never go out of style!

Here's the letter:

Dear Miss Manners: A long-term boyfriend and I loved taking pictures together and putting them up online on our Facebook profiles for everyone to see. However, we have been broken up for almost a year now, and I have been dating another guy for a while.

I have not taken down the pictures of us (there are hundreds of them) because I consider them a part of my history. People have to search pretty far back in my photos to find them. I am also afraid that it would offend him, as we are attempting to remain friends. However, it leads to some awkwardness when friends of my current boyfriend ask me about "that other guy" in some of my old pictures.

This is a fairly new problem for me, technology-wise, and I'm not sure how to approach it. Is it more appropriate for me to take the pictures down or leave them up?

The mind boggles a bit at the thought of HUNDREDS of pictures that might need removing (Miss Manners does not enter into discussion on the pros and cons of de-tagging pictures that remain online--is it ok to de-tag someone ELSE in your own picture?), though I admit I have a couple people in mind for whom this might be a problem someday.

But the fact that the writer says you have to "search back pretty far" to find the pictures indicates to me that she is doing just that (probably at work). And honestly, she's probably the only one. No, nothing online ever really goes away, and she is wise to realize that out of sight does NOT equal out of the computer's mind...but if they've been broken up for over a year, and the photos are buried under hundreds of new ones (the writer does not indicate whether or not the same pattern is recurring with the new boyfriend) I imagine that no one else is really interested enough in this person's life to go digging for them. Until she runs for public office.

My favorite excerpt from Miss Manners' response follows, and, although grammatically awkward, is a useful lesson for all of us today:
Online postings should contain only what you might freely show new acquaintances without embarrassing others or (as an astonishing number of people need to be told) themselves.