I’ve been thinking a great deal about decorum. 
Maybe that’s because someone recently intimated I don’t have any. I think I do, but obviously my definition may be different from my elderly parents or parents-in-law, or at the other extreme, my children’s.
Miss Manners where are you in the social media age?
Exactly what is the appropriate way for someone – a blogger, a writer, a wife, a mother – to behave online and offline?
Being actively involved in social media networks means essentially coming to grips with what Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) has termed ‘radical transparency’ – where you present one image to everyone, and deciding – will you or won’t you, join the dance?
Facebook’s view is that you no longer compartmentalise your life. You no longer don a ‘work’ face as you climb into your suit, or a ‘wassup friends’ face’ when you come out of that suit at the end of the day. You don’t put on the ‘vaguely polite but aloof’ face you previously presented to those you wished to impress – long-lost relatives, your children’s school governors, your professional advisors – any longer. It’s a one face fits all way of living. To even want to cling onto the idea of compartmentalising your work life, your home life, Zuckerberg and folllowers contend is almost sneaky.
“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Zuckerberg, 2009
I’m not sure I can agree with Zuckerberg, though I take integrity very seriously. I side with Virginia Woolf when she wrote about writing on the internet, in 1926 – “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people”
I try to tell the truth.
I don’t think truth changes in a different circle of friends, or when writing in a different age (2010 vs 1926) or whether it is written in a tweet or on a blog, rather than on paper.
But is truth consistent with being polite?
There is a freedom in behaving like a whole, resolved individual, unfettered by social convention, but like fire, that freedom used correctly can help, and enhance my life and those I interact with. Incorrectly tended, that fire can get out of hand.
Many years ago when I was a young exec at Microsoft, I used to put on a fire engine jacket with humungous shoulder pads and fight through the traffic to work. When I left and started my own consulting business it was a relief to be more ‘me’, to be able to work in my jeans, at any time of the day or with music playing and a decent view of the garden through the open window. I felt that I had the best of both worlds and that somehow I’d brought two sides of my life together. When the kids arrived it became even more convenient to be the mummy who works around the house and at work stuff on the computer, so they could see these two aspects as part of a whole me.
Yet even in those days I would get dressed up to meet a client, or I’d put on a work telephone voice.
Almost two decades later and the professional image and the private image have merged even more closely, but I’m not convinced that keeping some aspects of my life private and having boundaries, means I am secreting away a side of myself that I don’t wish others to see. I don’t believe that having boundaries makes me inauthentic. I think in a perverse kind of way, it even makes me more real. I don’t always get those boundaries right. I sometimes blog about funny stories from the Ann Summers shop in Bath, or how difficult it can be to conduct a romantic life in a small house filled with teenagers..
Sometimes I push those boundaries and that makes me fallable, and human. As we all are.
A new class
I think there’s a new class division out there. It’s not about money, or caste, or breeding or ancestory. In this brave new world I believe the division is based on social media literacy. For those who don’t use the internet daily as their number one forum for living, loving, working, socialising, I think there is a deeply held suspicion of this ‘new fangled internet wizardry’. For these people even sharing the most innocuous details about what books you enjoyed or whether you are feeling sad or angry, is exhibitionism.
It’s too easy to immediately write the new media naysayers off as old-fashioned elderly fuddy duddies, when I’ve come across thirty-somethings who feel like this. They genuinely do not believe that the world is round, in their view it is still flat. There are things you do and don’t say, metaphorical work jackets you put on and take off, depending on whether you’re at the coal face or at home. It’s just that they draw the lines more sharply than I would, and include things that I believe are inconsequential. Is it really important that the rest of the world not know about your struggles with depression, or homesickness – must we always keep a stiff upper lip?
Though I also question their criticism of me and other bloggers and where we draw our boundaries. How can they make judgements when they are not even inhabiting the same world as I?
There are others who appear to be the extreme opposite. These are the social media divas. They embrace exhibitionism and- dare I suggest it – they strive to shock and awe, in their ultimate aim to build influence. I’m not certain whether it is subconscious or intentional, but they appear to be suffering from a Jeremy Kyle style, Big Brother-ish need for celebrity.
Telling Big Brother that you fancy your roomate when you are ‘happily married’ outside of the house, is not being real. It’s car crash celebrity. There will be blood. Pain. Tears. Not all of those tears will be theirs. And frankly I think that’s wrong behaviour.
They naiively use their ‘real emotions spread bare for the world to see’ to fuel their celebrity. Call me cynical but I’m not convinced that all the purportedly self-effacing ‘sharing’ is authentic, some of it is merely the stuff of soap operas. Any old journo will tell you that bad news sells newspapers quicker than good news.
I don’t think these folk really understand the power of the dragon they are trying to tame. What’s even more interesting is that their over-sharing results in a fast rise and even faster decline from public grace. If the minutiae of your life is made for TV, where is the exclusivity? What makes it news? Too much information becomes boring after all. I was thinking about this the other day when I read Ashton Kutcher’s comment on the famous couple’s use of Twitter. He was laughing that since he and Demi Moore had made public their movements on Twitter the number of papparazzi waiting outside their door had decreased sharply. Here is an example of a celebrity who understands the explicit rules of celebrity, who can dance with the devil. I dare say it’s taken him some years to get his head around it.
I’m not sure what acceptable behaviour is, on the internet. Is it building boundaries, or breaking down walls? Is it secreting away details and living by the privacy settings or being authentic in the Facebook sense?
The only thing I know when thinking about the correct way to behave on a blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, Linkedin or anywhere else in the brave new media world is this:
If you can look at yourself without embarrassment, in the mirrored reflection of your computer screen, without looking away or feeling shame, you’re probably doing it right!
To thine own self, be true.
If you were Miss Manners, what would you include in a tome about how to behave on the internet?
Image: Flickr Creative Commons
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