Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (14 page)

Additionally, consider what you have to lose before you let someone—even someone you love, in a relationship you are sure will never end—turn a video camera on your naked patootie. Remember, times change; videotapes get mysteriously “lost.” Your willingness to appear doggy style on video should be directly
dis
proportionate to how much you like your job as an elementary-school principal.

How you unwittingly violate your own privacy—and that of your friends, relatives, and some guy you once emailed about the cross-country skis he was selling on Craigslist.

In addition to the government’s grabbing more and more of your personal information for “security” purposes (and occasionally losing it on a laptop some government employee has stolen out of their car), corporations are using technology to hoover up everything they can find out about you and everyone you know.

Big businesses info-grope you when you buy things from them, and especially when you get something for nothing. Basically, you get hosed by what you don’t pay for, like Facebook, which is far from the free service it appears to be. The same goes for newspaper sites that require Facebook registration, as well as Gmail and other Internet “freebies.” You pay for them by giving up some (or a lot) of your privacy, which can, in turn, open the door for a business to every e-mail contact and social media connection you have.

For example, “liking” a product on Facebook or entering some contest that requires a Facebook “like” may shoot out a little ad turd for it on top of the Facebook page of everyone who’s friended you—and maybe some of their friends. When you’re reading a compelling article on a newspaper site requiring “Facebook Connect” to log in, it’s easy to forget that “liking” it or commenting on it may announce your politics or interests to people you’d rather keep in the dark about them.

Beware of the address book hijackers: social networking sites that thank you for becoming a member by raiding your address book and sending out an e-mail (appearing to be from you) telling everyone in it that you want them to join. Goodreads, Pinterest, and
Reunion.com
have been among the guilty.
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22
When you join a site, avoid clicking on any seemingly harmless request like “See which of your friends are members!” This too often acts as a digital “open sesame!” for the site to e-mail everyone in your address book and maybe your entire list of Facebook friends, sometimes despite your not clicking many or any names. In short, if you’d rather avoid pissing off the 36,000 business contacts in your address book, it pays to think of social networking sites both as social networking sites and as giant parasites targeting your personal information like a tapeworm waiting for a move-in special on your large intestine.

HOW TO TREAT OTHER PEOPLE ONLINE AND WHAT TO DO WHEN THEY TREAT YOU BADLY.

The “Behave as You Are in Real Life” rule

It’s easy to get bewitched by the power you can have with a few clicks and keystrokes, especially when combined with anonymity. Understanding this, I made a rule for myself that every comment I make on a blog or website I make in my own full name. Now, maybe your job or family situation doesn’t allow you to post in your real-life identity, or maybe it just creeps you out. To keep from going ugly on the Internet, resolve to at least post as the same person you are when speaking face-to-face with someone at work, a dinner party, or the grocery store, assuming you aren’t in the habit of greeting a grocery-shopping stranger eyeing some out-of-season veggie with “well ur a dum bitch now aren’t you?”

The “Behave as You Are in Real Life” rule should also apply when commenting on the rich, famous, and enfranchised. Some movie star might have buttloads more money than you—and international fame, to boot—but it’s safe to assume she also has feelings. Marilyn Monroe told
Life
in 1962 about the ugliness she encountered:

When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way.… It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she—who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature—and it won’t hurt your feelings—like it’s happening to your clothing.… I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other.

Riding the rapids of social and antisocial networking

The great thing about Facebook is how wildly easy it makes it to connect. This is also the not-so-great thing about it. I had an unhappy childhood. I had no friends as a child—not one, until I was thirteen. I was, admittedly, an odd, scrawny, nerdy kid with poor social skills, but it didn’t help that I grew up in a neighborhood where my family didn’t fit in. A few years ago, I was surprised when I got a Facebook friend request from a guy I grew up with—a guy I strongly suspect was in the group of boys who regularly egged my parents’ windows, toilet-papered our trees, and shaving-creamed “Dirty Jew” on our garage. Because I mainly post links to my blog items on Facebook and because I earn a living based on the number of people reading me, I will friend just about anyone who asks (save for any guy whose profile picture is his erect penis), but I declined the guy’s friend request. My policy: If you “Dirty Jew” me at eight, you don’t get to “friend” me at forty-five.

Whom should you friend or unfriend? There have been countless articles on this subject, handing down what are supposedly the stone tablets on Facebook friending and unfriending, but the truth is, there’s no one policy that works for every person. To decide what works best for you, take into account who you are (and, if you’re looking for a job, who you want to be); what will get you fired, excommunicated, or disemboweled; the kind of content you post; and what you want your guiding principle to be. My guiding principle is openness and inclusiveness. For somebody who is less promiscuously public or who posts more personal content, privacy might rule.

When it’s hard to decide whether to accept or nix a friend request, try to predict which would ultimately cost you more, refusing to friend a particular person or putting up with them online. If you ignore a friend request, it’s usually best to avoid any explanation if it was from a stranger or someone you barely know. (You have no obligation to get in a debate with some stranger or distant acquaintance about your turndown, and any back-and-forth about it could ultimately get ugly.) If somebody you do know calls you on refusing their friend request, I think kindness is the best policy. (Honesty is for hardasses.) You could explain your refusal by saying you hope they won’t take it personally; you just keep your Facebook circle to close friends and family, or you mainly use Facebook to stay in touch with a few old friends. (This excuse flies best if your privacy settings are tight enough that they can’t see that you have a group of “close” friends and family numbering into the thousands.)

If you feel you just can’t decline a particular person’s friend request, you could always adjust your privacy settings so that person can only see certain posts, but keep in mind human fallibility, which always pops up at the worst of times. Also bear in mind how complex and confusing Facebook’s ever-changing privacy settings are, effectively making them “privacy” settings. In a 2010
New York Times
article, reporter Nick Bilton noted that Facebook’s privacy policy was 5,830 words long—almost 1,300 words longer than the U.S. Constitution (without any of its amendments)—and Facebook’s in-depth privacy FAQ page was a bulging 45,000 words long, the length of many books.

If you’d like to friend somebody you don’t know personally, the polite (and least creepy) way to go about it is to first message them to explain that you’re a fan of their work or thinking or that you find their posts on a friend’s Facebook feed smart and would like to follow them. Keep in mind that women, especially, are wary of being followed by guys who may turn out to be mashers. If your request isn’t accepted immediately, consider the possibility that the person isn’t all that active on Facebook and has yet to see it. And if someone you know refuses your friend request, consider, as I mentioned above, that they may use Facebook as a personal bulletin board to share things with a few close friends and family members. If they do write to explain themselves, be gracious in your response. Getting huffy about somebody’s desire for a close-knit Facebook circle is like getting in a snit because you knocked on the door of somebody you kind of know and they refused to let you march upstairs and rifle through their underwear drawer.

Unfriending—kicking somebody off your Facebook friends list—tends to go over like a kick in the face, especially when the dumped person is somebody you know in real life or have had a significant level of contact with online. Again, it’s wise to weigh the trade-off: What will ultimately cost you more, unfriending a dull or abrasive person or putting up with their dull or offensive comments online?

I will unfriend people who leave frequent ugly strings of comments on my Facebook posts—not because I’m afraid of ugly speech but because I don’t have the time to monitor and respond to all of it. If, however, some Facebook friend is just dull or mildly disagreeable, I go back to my guiding principle—openness and inclusiveness—remembering how it felt to be the kid who always got shunned by schoolmates who would have unexisted me if they could.

They’re called “friends,” not “prey”: A few additional points on civilized social networking.

• Think of your friend’s Facebook wall like their garage door.

Tempting as it may be to go over early one Sunday morning and spray-paint your politics across your friends’ garage door, I’m guessing you’d at least wait till they wake up to ask whether they’d mind.

Consider your own Facebook wall your very special place to post your politics, links to your favorite conspiracy theories, and THE CUTEST PICTURE EVER!!!!! of your cat snoring, but consider whether others share your views and your interest in your cat’s sleep positions before you haul off and post them on theirs. Some people will adjust their privacy settings so they have to approve what others try to post on their wall, but not everyone knows how or decides to do that. So, the safest, most considerate approach is messaging a friend to suggest a link for them to post—that is, if you are reasonably sure they’ll appreciate it and you aren’t just looking to hammer them on why people of their political persuasion are ruining the world.

• Tag with caution.

Because you have a tight circle of Facebook friends, each of whom shares your every belief about politics and religion, doesn’t mean everyone does. At a party, one of my blog commenters told a naughty joke about the pope to three friends he knew wouldn’t be offended. One of them posted it to her Facebook wall, crediting him by name, which made the post show up on his Facebook wall, too—where he said some of his religious friends would have seen it and found the joke “super-offensive.” The tagged post was up for an hour before he noticed it and deleted it from his wall.

• Facebook group invitations: Shockingly, people who share some of your interests may not share all of them.

Anyone who knows me in
the slightes
t knows that I am about as interested in playing one of Facebook’s games as I am in offering myself for human sacrifice, but those irritations—
uh,
invitations—keep on coming. Luckily, my Facebook friends seem more timid about dragging me into groups I have no interest in. My friend and Facebook friend Virginia Postrel, who describes herself as a “now-secular Presbyterian-turned-Jew,” is not so lucky:

Virginia Postrel

Periodic reminder: Do NOT put me in your FB group w/o checking first.

Renegade Catholics? Seriously?
²³

• The cameraphone is also a weapon.

Even if you know that one of your friends has no problem with people posting photos of them to Facebook, there are limits—or there should be. In short: Friends don’t post photos that make friends look like crap.

Yes, the camera may have captured
you
at the exact moment heaven opened up and the angels wept at the sight of your radiance. Resist publishing the shot if it also captured your friend at the exact moment she’s never looked more like a crazy homeless woman taking a brief break from rifling through a Dumpster to smile for the camera.

• Ask your friends to “like” your venture; don’t shine a bright light on them and force them to confess why they can’t or won’t.

When you post a request on your Facebook wall for a “like” for your book, play, or business venture, friends who see your post can choose to click to like it or just sail on past. They can’t do that if you message them directly, an imposition that can put them in the uncomfortable position of explaining why they need to decline.

• Mass-messaging: Don’t eat people’s time because it’s easier for you to send an invite to your entire friends list.

Refrain from mass-messaging an invitation to everyone on your friends list unless you will be giving away bars of gold bullion or all of your invitees are actual real-life friends who live close enough to come. I typically won’t drive thirteen miles to Hollywood for a party; I’m not taking three planes and a shuttle bus to get to “Karaoke Nite!!!” in Tampa.

• If you’re the boss, think twice before you friend your employees.

They are entitled to have private lives and might feel pressured to say yes to your friend request because you’re their supervisor and then forget you’re on their Facebook feed when they post about having a sexathon on the day they called in near-dead.