Tag Archives: netiquette

How to break up online: a practical guide for modern lovers

5 Apr

On the internet, everyone is a child, as both Stephen Fry and I have observed (though with differing levels of wit and brio).  Tiring of witnessing Facebook fuck-ups and Twitter twattery, I thought I’d share some wisdom collected and collated from painstaking (and at times painful) observation of online behaviour.  Love and its loss can be hell, but leaving a tear-sodden digital memento only serves to prolong the agony. 
Here are seven steps to clambering back to – if not heaven – certainly Planet Sanity.

If you need a quick visual allegory on the wisdom of separating public from private, click here.

One: slice like a ninja                                                                                 

So you’re regretting that giddy moment when you plighted your troth on Facebook. The public reconfiguration is too painful to be borne.
The good news is it doesn’t need to be. Figure out what time most of your network will be asleep. Set your alarm. Log onto Facebook. Go to ‘edit my profile,’ change your relationship status, then immmediately remove the update from your wall.
Three clicks, three seconds.
Stealth and speed is key. You need to act fast to reduce the likelihood of your friends commenting on it. If you’re friends with nerds, you may have a problem; nerds never sleep.  However, if you’re friends with nerds, this entire dilemma may feel somewhat unfamiliar to you.

Two: throw a block party

Starve your inner masochist of the oxygen of constant peeks into your ex’s life.  It’s a masochist; it craves punishment.  You, on the other hand are a healthy, well-adjusted individual who is moving on with your life without continually reopening the wound to season it with salt.  Use a service like Knowem or Username Check to ensure you’ve blocked them in every single possible location, on the offchance you start using the service again. Even Plurk. Much like love, social network usage can be unpredictable. You thought you’d be with your love forever – and that’s how you used to feel about Friendster, too.

Three: PDAs are DOA.

Public Displays of Angst will do you no good at all. Whether the split was acrimonious or amicable;  whether your relationship spanned five decades or five minutes, nothing worth saying about the private affairs of human beings can be adequately expressed in a status update.  By giving in to the temptation, essentially, you’ve let your ex down, you’ve let humanity down, but most of all, you’ve let yourself down. Isn’t that right, Mrs Harbord?  If you must rant and rave, keep it old school: write it in a letter – make it as long and vitriolic as you like – then tear it up.
Eat the pieces, if you like. Feel better?

Four: where is my mind?

Because you clearly weren’t paying attention during point three, and because you think you might feel better if you express your pain to the world, drop by drop, here’s a pro-tip: create a new twitter account. Lock it. Invite close friends or distant ones to view it; just don’t invite your boss or anyone you may wish to deal with on a professional footing at any point in the future, ever. Call it something suitably bonkers to remind your friends not to share your crazed rantings outside your locked network.
Then you can choke up lumps of anguish 140 characters at a time until the heartache goes away or you become revulsed by your own self-indulgence, whichever happens first.

Five: every breath you take

Much like the adage that eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, cyber-stalking will bring little joy to the stalker. Even after you’ve blocked your ex, it doesn’t take much Google-fu to bring a flood of information about their activities into your sad little world. But like smoking and many other addictive behaviours, it’s a sin of commission, not omission.  It’s genuinely easier not to do something than it is to do it.  Yes, there are photos of him surrounded by a bevy of beauties. Yes, she does seem to be using an awful lot of flirty emoticons when she talks to @thatdouche on Twitter.  So what?  Either they have sufficient self-regard that they’re simply choosing not to post photographs of themselves crying into the gin online, or they’ve moved on. Isn’t it time you did?

(And delete the Google Alerts for their name immediately. That’s just creepy.)

Six: fake it til you make it… (…to the bedlam)

This isn’t really something that should ever need to be expressed, but in this topsy-turvy world, apparently sense is becoming uncommon, so here goes: do not, under any circumstances, create a honey-trap fake profile on Facebook, RSVP or even Second Life in which you create the profile of your ex’s dream lover in order to cyber-seduce them.
It proves nothing.
If the person of your dreams expressed an interest in you, you’d probably take the bait too, and more importantly, your fraudulent succubus / incubus won’t bring your lover back, because it’s not real, remember? If a shared love of pina coladas didn’t keep you together, it certainly won’t reunite you now, unless your ex actually left you because you weren’t crazy or deceptive enough.  In which case, go nuts. Literally.

Seven: don’t blog about it. Oh, wait….

<caveat>You’re so vain, you probably think this blog post is about you…and it probably is, but I mean it with love and respect.
In love, as online, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We’re forging through uncharted waters, and there are bound to be casualties. (I count myself amongst their number).

Still making mistakes, but never the same ones twice.</caveat>

Growing up online: why the days of our digital adolescence are numbered

29 Sep

The internet is still in its infancy, and our use of it is still developing.  It’s an exciting time to be alive; I’d argue that no single technological advance since the printing press has transformed our culture, normative behaviours and society as profoundly.  New possibilities and new ways of interacting are opening up every day.

However, this cuts both ways, and it’s depressing to see that one consequence of the new is a marked increase in the amount of genuinely awful behaviour performed by otherwise functional adults.  Seeing ill-advised tweets, oversharing via Facebook updates and emotive personal posts, I’m reminded of the giddy immediacy of my teenage years, in which I existed in a state of selfish isolation, immersed in the frenzy of the Now.

Nothing was more important than my feelings that very second; I had no sense of, or interest in a broader context or that my actions could have consequences of any significance.  And this seems to be the case for many people online; the fact one feels this way at this moment is justification enough for broadcasting that information to the planet.

I feel, therefore I post.

Hal Niedzviecki refers to this phenomenon as “Peep Culture,” suggesting that we’re witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life.

Perhaps the logical progression of our paparazzi-fuelled, celebrity-obsessed culture is to have us believing that revelations of a wincingly personal nature are everyone’s business.

There again, we’re not taking out one page ads in the Times or employing a town crier to announce our break-ups or our shitty days at work.  This behaviour is only occurring online.

I’d argue that it’s due to a combination of factors:

1) the false sense that these online spaces aren’t ‘serious’ and don’t have real life impact: the value of communication online is somehow seen as less than offline interaction

2) the ease, speed and accessibility with which one can post anything from anywhere. An emotion that probably would have dissipated by the time you’d put pen to paper and started looking for a stamp is shared, out there and un-retractable in three seconds flat.

3) an erroneous belief that these spaces are somehow lawless, frontier territory where all bets are off, crimes go unpunished and an outlaw-esque anonymity can be preserved

A post on the Social Media Law Student blog makes the point that

People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more.  Social media networks such as Facebook and MySpace are not to blame for sheer stupidity…

…but they do make stupid actions harder to retract and easier to prove.

Our actions have implications, consequences; the spaces may be virtual, but this is very real.

Thirty-five percent of employers reported finding content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate; Facebook evidence was used to convict gang members in Britain who posted photos of themselves posing with guns; Australian courts allow legal documents to be served via Facebook; lawyers have begun to use social profiles in divorce cases.  Four Awkward Moments on Facebook is hilarious, unless you’re one of the people involved: I can only imagine the lacerating sense of shame and hurt they must have experienced.

Part Two: Imagining the future ( a proto-post)

I’m confident that the next generation will view our bumbling online interactions with humour and, I hope, some pity, much in the way that I view photographs of my parents in their heyday; fondly and with affectionate mockery.  I can’t predict what these new models of behaviour will look like but I wonder whether our notions of public and private space will be fundamentally redefined; will a new set of boundaries be created or will these constructs simply have drifted into irrelevance?

Will the citizens of the future live in digital glass houses?
When everything is on display and there’s no separation between your inside voice and outside voice, will people’s personal (increasingly public lives) cease to have any interest or relevance – is the sense of intimacy we use to build social cohesion in part derived from the sense one is holding privileged information?  In this landscape, our perceptions of each other would be based on new criteria and new values not related to how much we earn or who we’re screwing.  Although I find this a faintly terrifying prospect, I can’t help but feel this re-imagining of our future is the most exciting, the most radical (and the least likely to occur).

Alternatively, will this new generation, kids who’ll take in the digital space with their mother’s milk become the New New Puritans? There is surely a possibility they will enact a backlash against the over-availability and over-sharing of information, images and personal data.  With public figures as influential as Obama warning schoolkids to think about the long term consequences of the stuff they share on Facebook, will we see a generation of locked down profiles, gated social spaces and private Twitter streams.  Will we become paranoiac data-hoarders, carefully considering every piece of information dispersed through the web?

Or – returning to Planet Reality – will we just have to grow up, embrace the new and reign in some of the worst excesses of overly disclosive behaviour in favour of a more reasoned approach?  Being a teenager is fun, but we can’t remain in a virtual NeverNeverland forever.
It may be more staid and a little less compelling than the ambulance-chasing, Schadenfreudian thrill of watching someone crash and burn online, but perhaps fewer hearts and reputations damaged beyond repair is worth losing out on a little second-hand salaciousness for….

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.