Monday, February 2, 2009

Facebook makes us nicer online

Maybe it’s because I have nice friends on Facebook but I think this Facebook thing is making people nicer online.

Know how much restraint it takes to not fire off a nasty e-mail because a friend is being just too much? And when we send an e-mail about a co-worker to a friend but actually sent it to the offender? That one is very hard to fix.

We self-edit with Facebook.
But with Facebook’s transparency, we self-edit the image we want to project to the world. That’s possibly thousands and thousands of friends, co-workers, maybe even potential love interests who can read any wall post, comment, and status update we write. Who wants to look like a jerk? We end up not calling out women who run off with our husbands or lashing out for someone doing other things that hurt us. We just focus our attention on other friends and they’ll write nice things on our walls.

Friends can help us, so we have to mind our manners.
See, having lots of friends on Facebook is the key for many and anything to jeopardize that is just stupid. Facebook has turned into a place where we not only stay in touch with friends and families but it’s a door to experts when you have questions, or even a pick-me-up after a bad day etc.

Let me know if you find examples that prove me wrong.

Here are summaries of examples of the closest things I could find to Facebook meanness lately:
- 2009 is a new year to start over and I don’t need some of you stupid people anyway.
- Mary Poppins, you are all that and a bag of chips, aren’t you?
- I have just had it with people, really.
- A colleague stole my idea and got credit for it. But I don’t want to say anything to him because he just lost his son. (Wow, think your other colleagues DON’T know who this person is? You sure are being nice, aren’t ya?)
- I am the alpha female and understand why certain women are jealous. And you know who you are.
- I am not working another extra hour or Sunday for The Man.

None of these are that bad.

One exception to this idea, however: A lot of Facebook pages are based on Super Heroes, fictitious people and TV stars, like this one: where some page owners write some gruesome stories about their characters and vent. But Facebook has been shutting down those pages.

4 comments:

kathryn said...

Not sure that I'm "nicer" but it definitely is a different side to me - a little more personal perhaps? I do edit over there - people write inappropriate and extremely personal things on walls. If that happens on my wall I delete! This is interesting.....

Anonymous said...

Facebook is for CHEATERS!

Anonymous said...

Disiento de sus mentiras y el engaño totales. ¡Usted no es una mujer!

Adoro helado también!

Rick Sanchez C154 said...

It saddens me how there are so many rude RPers on Mysapce but Facebook has a nasty tendency to delete RP folks. Many of them are quite nice.