Cutline Speaks

Lets All Agree on Social Networking Manners

posted by Rachael on March 25, 2010

About a year ago, dating site YourTango created a hilarious and prescient video all about Facebook relationship manners. The video touched on what now seem like really straightforward rules, such as when to adjust your relationship settings and how to avoid posting too much information (TMI) on a significant other's Wall.

But what about non-relationship Facebook rules? And what about Twitter rules? The longer I'm on both of these sites, the more "friends" I collect from every aspect of my life: current and former colleagues, clients, networking contacts, college friends, high school friends, old roommates, my fiance's family members, my family members, my parents . . . the list goes on and on. I have to assume that this is occurring for most people at this point: nearly everyone you know from all aspects of your life is somehow connected to you on the Social Web.

There's a whole new world of questions about what is and isn't appropriate on social media outlets. I don't have the answers, but I've certainly been thinking more about these questions lately.

Here are some of my social networking manner dilemmas:

• Initiating an argument: You have a friend who thinks health care reform is the worst thing to happen to America since Heidi and Spencer Pratt and you happen to disagree. She constantly updates her profile or Twitter account with links and messages that articulate how frustrated she is over the issue. Do you chime in and try to change her mind? Is instigating a debate on someone's Facebook wall appropriate? How about going after them on Twitter? Or do you just accept that these are her views and leave it alone? What's the line for political, religious and really any argument on the social Web?

• Uploading old photos of people and tagging: I think we can all agree that tagging drunken photos of friends from your weekend in Vegas is pretty rude. But what about that friend who is migrating all of his digital photos over to Facebook? Is it cool to tag a photo of a friend from 10 years ago? What if it is even older and from your awkward years (braces, bad '80's hair, etc.)?

• Games and surveys: For some people, the only reason to even sign up for a site like Facebook is to play games with your friends while you're at work. For others, these social gamers are an annoyance and their farming bejeweled updates clog up news feeds. Is it the gamer's responsibility to not update their wall every time they reach a high score, or should the rest of us just hide them from our feeds?

• Web memes: I think we need to decide once and for all what to make of these. Are people who participate in surveys like 10 things you didn't know about me bored and possibly narcissistic? What about hashtags that encourage memes on Twitter that are gross (see Tyra Banks recent addition to the #IGotCornsOnMyToesCuz topic)? Or is it good old-fashioned fun that helps us all connect to each other in an increasingly alienating digital age? Also, if "if 1,000,000 people join this group, there will be 1,000,000 in it" happens every day, does it even mean anything anymore?

I don't think there are easy answers. In fact, maybe the frontier spirit of the Internet dictates that there can be no rules and we'll all have to draw up our own social networking boundaries related to etiquette. I for one will take it on a case-by-case basis and know that I have the power to defriend and block you if you tag one more terrible picture of me. You know who you are!

Tags for this post: social networking