What happens when you expected a phone call about something and read about it in a status update instead? What’s the polite response to a distant friend posting bad news on Facebook? What to do with sensitive information?
Making matters trickier, good etiquette on Facebook might not apply on Twitter or in an e-mail. These days, milestones like marriage, pregnancy, breakups and divorce are being described over more forms of communications than ever.
“Because it’s so new, there is sort of a gray area of what the manners are,” said Brian McGee, a 33-year-old father-to-be in Charlotte, N.C.
He’d just gotten his first BlackBerry when he and his wife were driving to a doctor’s appointment to learn the baby’s sex. He had the BlackBerry out and was thumbing something.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ recalled his wife, Megan Gelaburt-McGee. “He was posting that we were on the way to the doctor’s office to find out the baby’s sex. I said, ‘Don’t post that!’ “
She said she wanted to tell her close friends the baby’s gender personally, though she didn’t mean an in-person visit. She didn’t even mean a phone call. She drew the universal female symbol on her belly, had a friend take a photo and sent it in an e-mail to about 20 people: relatives, bridesmaids, longtime friends.
“We (weren’t) going to keep the sex of the baby a secret,” she said. “But I don’t want to have my cousin find out through Facebook.”
Etiquette adviser Anna Post, the great-great- granddaughter of manners icon Emily Post, recommends taking a step back before rushing to type, whether it’s good news about you or a response to someone else’s bad news.
An e-mail is considered acceptable for many situations, but even people comfortable with that might draw the line at social networks. The average person has 120 “friends” on Facebook, the company says. In real life, the average North American has about three very close friends and 20 people they are pretty close to, said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist.
Facebook has studied how people decide what information they share and how to share it. In one, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, explored with his team what tends to dictate the number of photos people upload. It turns out the number wasn’t based on how many of their friends showed approval for the photos by clicking that they liked them, or how many comments were left on each.
“Rather, it was based on how many photos your friends uploaded,” he said. “Social norms are constantly being developed based on what friends do.”
