Mastering the etiquette of the social web

Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 04/06/2009 2:59 PM  |  Lifestyle

The story of communications is not just about mastering the technology. It's also about mastering the etiquette. And now we have a bunch of new ones to get our heads around.

Take Twitter. If someone follows you, do you follow them?

And Facebook. What do you do if someone tags a photo of you that you'd really prefer to be buried deep in the woods?

Of course, this all may mean nothing to you, in which case you can breathe a sigh of relief. The social web hasn't hit you.

Yet.

If you think it's just another world, and one you don't need to bother with, consider for a moment those poor souls who thought the telephone an immoral fad.

Women were told not to talk to men via it unless there was a chaperone present. For many it was a lewd intrusion upon respectability.

In a way they were right.

We're still struggling with the etiquette of its descendant, the cell phone. Many of us are driven to apoplexy by people checking their phones mid-sentence.

Or younger people who seem incapable of normal conversation because of the distraction of the small screen.

Instant messaging has its own sets of rules. Lots of acronyms and sideways smile icons help to fill the gaps of nuance created by the absence of face-to-face interaction.

But all this is nothing compared to the complexity of the social web.

We've now encountered new layers of communities - Facebook friends, real world friends, networking friends - that we don't yet have good names for.

In the process of padding our Facebook address books to show how popular we are, we drown out the true friends. I missed a status update from a pregnant friend - "It's a boy!" - because it got drowned out by trifling nonsense from mediocre buddies I'd never actually met.

The problem is we have no real etiquette to deal with this kind of thing, and I wouldn't mind so much but that I think we are kind of losing sight of why we built these Towers of Babel in the first place.

We all want to use the net to reach out to people outside our narrow world. But we lack the same social skills we take for granted offline to weed out the undesirables, set limits and, well, figure out who we want in our world and who we don't.

Take Facebook for example. Among its other strengths - including contacting people you do know - it's actually a great way to contact people who you don't know. Google someone and chances are their Facebook page comes top.

But Facebook won't let you contact someone without opening the door to friendship. And that makes it awkward. If we phoned someone in the old days, or sent them a letter, or even an email, that didn't imply friendship.

Now connecting on Facebook implies friendship. And, unless you're assiduous in your Facebook management, anyone added on Facebook is no less or more a buddy than your oldest schoolyard chum whose wedding in a Madagascar rodeo you attended.

Facebook and all these services flatten friendships and cheapen the word.

They also toy with other people's privacy.

We're all oh-so-careful with our own privacy, but then we happily post a photo of a drunken evening with the Bay City Rollers and tag all our friends - most of whom are now justices of the peace or bishops.

I know - I've done this and realized that not everyone found that jape involving the string underpants quite as funny at the time, let alone 25 years on.

Facebook plays fast and loose with what used to be intimate memories shared among a treasured few.

So, here are a few rules I set for myself:

Don't add people to Facebook unless you've met them.

Don't tag friends on old photos without asking them first.

Don't ask to be someone's buddy without an accompanying note, unless you really know that person is going to recognize your name.

Oh, and don't listen to other people telling you there are rules.

Which brings me to Twitter. Not sure how many of you are using this, but I'm sure you will, so here goes.

Twitter has already become a nightmare of people "following" other people - in other words, signing up to receive their status updates and other pontifications. This was fine when Twitter was small, but now it's full of people whose idea of style is to wear a suit for their profile photo.

It's a difficult world, because if you have too many followers and don't follow enough people, it's noticed and commented on.

So you need to follow some people, and if you have a lot of people following you, you need to at least follow half that number.

The problem is that just because someone follows you doesn't mean that they're worth following.

It's a bit like Groucho Marx's comment: If someone is following your every utterance, then by definition they're probably not very interesting people.

Plus Twitter, like every other social media outlet, is full of self-promoters - the kind of people who collar you at parties and try to sell you a handbag or some other multilevel marketing scam. Awful.

So here, therefore, are some of my rules for Twitter:

Don't be shy about "unfollowing". It's easy enough. If someone sends a tweet - an utterance on Twitter - I find boring or distasteful, overly introverted and unilluminating, I unfollow. No questions asked. Life's too short.

Don't follow anyone who sports a tie, a suit, a silly hat, or a family pet in their profile picture.

Don't feel you've got to reply to anyone on Twitter who sends you a message. I know everyone says you should, but - repeat after me - life is too short.

Don't set up automatic messages that say "Thanks for following me! You rock!" or some such. Lame, and frankly annoying. Unfollow anyone who does this.

OK, I could go on but I shouldn't.

As I said before: If you have no idea what "unfollow" means in this context, then count yourself lucky. For now.

(c) Copyright 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd.

This article cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com. Or on twitter at loosewire.

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