Play nice on the FB!

The humor from This Washington Post article on what we really mean when we post to Facebook comes from the truth in what the fake posts suggest about real posts on Facebook, a truth I recognize from my own research and from what I know as a card-carrying member of the Social Network.

Facebook is different than face-to-face interaction. We can pretend not to have read stuff that we don't have anything nice to say about. And we can put our best foot (face) forward at all times, and allow others to do the same! (by using lots of happy punctuation marks and symbols =0)

I particularly like this example from the article, (Petri, Alexandra, from "What we really mean when we post on Facebook." Washington Post Blog. Posted at 12:54 PM ET, 01/31/2011,http://voices.washingtonpost.com/compost/2011/01/what_we_really_mean_when_we_po.html)

Facebook gives us so many outs to having to do any real work to save face.

But I am NOT a doom-and-gloom sayer about our online social lives. I think Facebook and other new media are very positive additions to society. (And that everyone who says otherwise is just a scared old curmudgeon.) I love the glimpses into the lives of my friends who would probably not have called or emailed me to share the same news, but who I now can congratulate or sympathize with both on the FB and next time we hang out.

I understand how it may be hard to see all the glamor and glitter people constantly put forth, but if we all remember that it's everybody's Facebook self (like the air-brushed people in magazines) maybe we'll be less-likely to compare our offline selves to the online personas we see (and we'll just do a bit more air-brushing on our own FB persona and enjoy the glam!)

Footnote: this does NOT include what goes on on politician pages where manners fly out the window. (See Lisa Jackson's Facebook page for an example of people being nasty).