Share and (over) share alike.

...Actually, no, please don't.

Maybe it’s just me and I am getting old and cynical and bitter but people REALLY should stop themselves and have a think before they hit the ‘submit’ button.

What am I talking about? The seemingly inescapable tendency to ‘overshare’ on social networking (SN) sites; predominantly Facebook because (in my opinion) that is the most unavoidable variety of SN which anyone with 3 brain cells can operate and which unfortunately does not screen users for any modicum of decency, discretion or grammatical abilities. (Neither do the others really but lets face it, Bebo is for kids, Myspace is totally last decade and Twitter I shall come to shortly – FB is sadly ubiquitous).

You do not have to look very far to see and understand how completely integral SN is to our everyday lives, The Guardian even has an entire section of it’s online edition dedicated purely to social networking as a medium.

Facebook, it seems, is the social network of choice for the masses. I have, in general, always had a love/hate relationship with it but increasingly I find it pretty unappealing and mostly this is due to 3 things.

1.    Oversharing. Appalling oversharing. Oversharing so bad that I cringe and am a bit sick in my mouth when I read it. There is a mildly amusing website dedicated to this subject here.

2.    People who have so little grasp of grammar that their posts turn me into what I can only describe as a ‘Grammar Nazi’. If you do not know the difference between there, their and they’re I am talking to you. And I probably have your profile set to hidden if we are ‘friends’ on Facebook. This bracket also includes people who use that bastardisation of English known as ‘text speak’. Also, “Brrraaaap” is not a word unless you are in Blazin Squad and we all know what happened to them. 

3.    Mafia Wars. Pretend farms. Virtual cafes. Seriously – I struggle to understand how anyone with a job and a family and friends ever has time for this nonsense. PLEASE do not send me endless invites and requests for help with “catering” for an imaginary chip shop or milking your imaginary cows. Because I get irrationally angry and it ruins my day when you do. I am probably going to develop repetitive strain in my mouse hand from clicking ‘block’ and ‘hide’ too much at this rate.

Blazin Squad.

But, returning to the oversharing. I am sure the lack of ‘netiquette’ prevalent in facebook users is worse than it is on Twitter and I do believe this is in part because of demographic differences between user groups. This article comments on research published recently which underlines my feelings on the subject. This is broadly sweeping of course but it does explain some aspects of a phenomenon which, in my experience, is curiously commonplace on FB but less so on Twitter.

The general consensus is that Twitter users are educated to a higher level than FB users. I am hardly surprised at this because Twitter is less user-friendly and less facilitating of verbal diarrhoea.  I think that the 140 character limit on Twitter actually works in two ways to stop people ‘oversharing’.

Firstly you have to be able to be succinct and eloquent in order to make sense and get your point across within the text limit and secondly, in order to do this it is routine to type your message in as you want it and then self edit down to within the limit, working like a human thesaurus to cleverly cut it down to size. Doing so forces you to really think about what you want to say and I believe that this stopping and thinking before submitting is the key part of the process which is lacking on FB with an unlimited text box.

As Facebook is, sadly, pretty unavoidable for some things, keeping in touch with genuine friends and some remote members of family for instance, or providing a great forum for holiday photos (check out our Little Monkey album here), let us return to the problems I have with the site. Well, with the manners of it's users really.

I genuinely feel sorry for those people (and we all know them) who insist on shouting, ranting and swearing at their various ‘friends’ for apparent slights which have occurred but which they clearly need everybody to know about. I assume that they only publish it on FB to get a reaction from said individuals because if the target can’t see how potty mouthed they have made you then what’s the point, right? It is effectively ‘Jeremy Kyle Syndrome’ – needless, base level, cringe inducing, asbo collecting, attention seeking, vile behaviour which seriously makes you question where on earth humanity is heading. If I wanted to view this kind of behaviour I would watch Jeremy Vile Kyle. I do not want to be confronted by it in my ‘news’ stream.

This kind of behaviour is the social networking version of living on a perfectly nice street which, in daylight seems fine and where you are vaguely aware of all of your neighbours and have no major issues with them most of the time. But then every so often one of them (and its usually the same one) gets absolutely ratted and decides to have a full blown domestic in the middle of the street, regardless of the ongoing sane and peaceful lives around them they are disrupting. Why they have decided to use the street rather than their living room remains a mystery but one can only assume that an audience makes them feel better about their selfish, idiotic lives.

Worse than these shouty, abusive updates are the ones that make me a bit sick in my mouth. These are the completely, utterly, vulgar and tasteless declarations regarding people’s sex lives (or lack thereof). I think these individuals actually do need expert help. It is really difficult to view this kind of oversharing with anything other than pity; an incredibly misguided and vulgar adult version of playground prima donnas vying to be the object of attention – a clear, desperate yelp for attention. I do not want these kinds of people as my ‘friends’. Thankfully they will never be Friends with a capital F – friends in the real world.

Talking of which, I am absolutely useless at the art of ‘defriending’ or culling on facebook. Why? I wish I knew. Probably because it is much easier and avoids confrontation to just use the ‘hide’ function (thank you Mr Zuckerberg for the hide function!!) and the awful people I have hidden will not even know I have done so. In fact I have only actually ‘removed’ a ‘friend’ a couple of times. One was a girl I had gone to school with (and never really got to know very well) who had clearly turned into a full blown asbo idiot and thought it hilariously funny to upload a video of her cat going round in the tumble dryer where her magnificent specimen of a boyfriend had put it for a laugh. Yes, really. I didn’t even pause to think about offending her that time.

Somebody summed up the differences between FB and Twitter really well to me the other day, stating that Twitter is for news, sharing thoughts and experiences, celebrity watching, monitoring world events (and over the weekend during the appalling catastrophe in Norway it was also a tool for contact and reassurance) whereas FB is merely “a place to look at photos, predominantly baby photos”. And farm imaginary cows, of course.

This observation was from a person the same age as me and I guess it reflects the fact that our generation is popping out babies left right and centre at the moment. I, however, am not, being some kind of freak of nature with a natural, inbuilt dislike of children matched well to my husband’s absolute horror at the idea. Maybe that is why Twitter appeals more, it is rare to see people tweeting about what Alfie or Izzy did today, FB seems to be the natural forum for offspring discussion, Twitter is not.

My experience of twitter is that each tweet is there for a reason, they can be funny, considered, insightful or informative, sometimes all of the above. But very rarely are they utterly mundane, even less often are they obnoxious or Jeremy-Kyle-esque. Despite my uselessness with the removal of friends on FB I am completely at ease with un-following. Twitter being not so focussed on being ‘friends’ with everyone you have ever crossed paths with in your life lends itself to being far less precious about being followed. And the people that I do follow I am therefore genuinely interested in, not obliged to. 

And so I will probably continue to use both but Twitter far more frequently. Facebook does have some strengths; it has better photo facilities and some people I have genuinely wanted to be in contact with are only on FB, but I will continue to hide the idiots and try to turn a blind eye to the things that annoy me. I can’t help wondering where it will all lead though. Will people start to behave more acceptably over time, perhaps, when social networking is less of a new toy? I certainly hope so. Or maybe people will begin to be more considered about who they have within their ‘friend’ set. My new year’s resolution for 2012 is to have a proper big Facebook cull and only keep the people with whom I genuinely want to stay in touch.  

One thing I am sure about though - I predict an increase in the amount of studies into social networking behaviour versus demographics and personally I will be reading those with interest, probably, of course, while tweeting fervently.