Etiquette of Facebook

We hear a lot about people messing around on Facebook: teenage parties that end up with 300 guests, teachers who are Friends with their pupils, and people who are not what they claim to be. But we hear very little about good Facebook behaviour. Those of us who strive to be a nicer, more conscientious Friend on Facebook than we might be in real life. Responding to each communication made on our wall quickly and with wit, scouring the internet, newspapers and sometimes even real life for the most delicate of titbits to share. Remembering birthdays for heaven sake! We are going out of our way to project an idealised version of ourself.

And it struck me that Facebook is nothing new at all, its ways are infused with the manner of the 18th century, the Enlightenment Age, when the epistolary form was king. We are all acquiring the taste and discernment of Georgians and the court of Versailles...

Facebook users are drawn to their own society and somehow this is seen as better and certainly more refined than the everyday world; in fact, sometimes furiously texting that we are outsiders or visitors to the actual world as we analyse what is occurring in it on Facebook in real time. Like a progress through a series of Robert Adam rooms, we are allowed access to greater and greater levels of intimacy with other Facebook users depending on our status. Most activity between Friends takes place as it were in the outer room where the regular visitor might be received but if we show wit in our conversations, and fitness, we can be drawn further into the house of Adam through the library, the drawing room and perhaps even to the boudoir.

But there is nothing very sexy about this Facebook society all governed by manners. In Georgian boudoirs the most you might get is the voyeur's lot (and insight) of watching another dress, the intimate self being replaced by the social one. And don't be sure of your place in it, be over-intimate, or you will tumble back down and out onto the street. Your house, or at least its wall, a ghostly mansion; while the cards you leave in the virtual hands of other hosts and hostesses are ignored (and occasionally spat back in your face).

And what has this to do with poetry? Well, in Georgian England for example it was possible to reach the very top of society by dressing well, being good with a phaeton and above all articulate. Beau Brummel being a case in point. Our bon mots on the Facebook wall are epigrams that show the range of our characters, our intellectualism, our worth; our conversations by wall mail, like the open correspondences of the epistolary form popular in the 18th century, are meant to be read and chewed over in the salon.

Facebook gives us the illusion of time and discernment, a better society that we must strive to be accepted into. No wonder it is so seductive. With a little polish, we can all be Swift, Dryden or Pope; with a little luck,  maybe even Shelley, Scott or Byron.

The madness of twitter and poets

'The way in which people frantically communicate online via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can be seen as a modern form of madness, according to the leading sociologist.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in her new book, Alone Together: “A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological.”'

This is from the UK Daily Telegraph website, you can read the full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8276948/Social-networking-sites-are-a-modern-form-of-madness.html

I think that Turkle is missing the point, what people are doing on social networking sites is writing. It may not be good writing but it comes from a desire to write and read. And to communicate through that medium. There is something about writing and reading that perfects communication, that makes it - in fact - poetic.

Wordsworthian reflection and recalled emotion may be a long way away from tossing down a status update; but healthy writers of all kinds think about their utterances and know it is once removed from reality. Bad writing, bad reading or malicious intent then is to blame for failures in communication.

It surprises me that sociologists bang on about this but then it seems such book titles and research always make use in the conservative press. It seems to be a result of a number of things including:

1. Fear of mass communication - people shouldn't be allowed to talk to each other without control, they are too stupid or mad.
2. Fear of the other groups - the working class, fundamentalists, lapdogs - are conspiring to find a voice and alter our perception of normal.
3. A lack of awareness of literature - what about ballads, graffiti, letters and penny pamphlets and all the spontaneous writing of the past that stirred people up, and allowed stories, gossip, misunderstandings, new ideas to pass up and down countries and around the world; don't forget Walter Scott the Scottish writer had read American Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow story before he met Irving in 1816! Global reading isn't something new...
4. A fear of writing and most especially poetry - and that can never be a good thing; one strand of Twitter for example and the status update is that poets are best equipped to write it; and I guess that must be pretty scary for normal folks!