Manners, Please!

I love Facebook!  It's a great way to spend an hour or twelve. With Facebook, you can connect with old friends, share photos, play games, etc. It's a really fun social network, but there are drawbacks to Facebook (as with everything). One of the biggest bugaboos for me is: Because Facebook is pretty much an open, yet strangely anonymous, forum, people have no compunction about writing things that they would never say to another person's face. Manners go right out the window. Now I know I'm not exactly Miss Manners or Emily Post but I try to mind my Ps and Qs when posting.

I'll give you an example of Jane and John... No, wait, those names are too boring. How about Sheresa and Cloddington? Much better - sounds like a Harlequin romance novel. Sheresa posted a cute video on her page and I made a rather amusing comment about it (if I do say so myself). Cloddington decides to comment as well, but makes a rather scathing remark about what I wrote. Now, I don't know Cloddington and don't really give a crap about his opinion. After all with a name like Cloddington, you expect a certain type of obnoxious person. (Yeah, yeah, I know I made up that name, but just go with it.) Most likely, Cloddington thought he was being amusing bbbbuuuuuuuuuut his comment was not funny, just plain rude. I thought to myself, "Would he have said that if we were standing face to face?" Probably not. And if he did, I would be able to defend myself, but in cyber world, I'm not going to get into a heated discussion with a complete stranger over a dumb YouTube video.

A couple of years ago, I learned a valuable lesson about posting publicly: I had publicly answered a friend's question about an instructor of one of my classes. Mind you, I didn't say anything terrible (just that he didn't have enough experience to be teaching a 300 level class) and even though I didn't mention his name, the instructor saw the comment, knew I was talking about him and his feelings were hurt. It never occurred to me that my friend and this instructor might be Facebook friends. Oops, my bad! And my apologies.

We all just need to be a little more diligent when posting comments on Facebook, particularly when posting comments about a perfect stranger. With your friends, snarky comments are most likely acceptable and sometimes even necessary. Off the cuff remarks can be hurtful or annoying to people, even those meant to be amusing. Tone is tough trait to exhibit in the written medium. Maybe we should just get back to the basic adage: "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" - with one proviso. You may say anything you want about Herman Cain - because he's a public figure and a douche bag! (Did you see what I did there?)