katy lindemann // seemingly unconnected

[ photo courtesy ]

There’s no rulebook about how we should and shouldn’t be using the social tools that are increasingly becoming a central part of our digital lives. The way we use them is self-defined – we make it up as we go along, and habits change and evolve over time. Twitter’s infamous retweet function was recently implemented as an official feature, but it wasn’t originated by Twitter, it developed organically amongst users, and only integrated into the Twitter.com functionality once its use had become widespread. Facebook is having to work out its terms of use as users decide how they want to use the tool – are extremist or defamatory groups an expression of freedom of speech or an unacceptable usage of the service?

If it’s not clear cut for those who run these services, it’s even less clear what the rules of engagement are for the users. We use them how we want, working it out as we go.

But our own ideas of how we can or should be using social tools can vary immensely – and the lack of rules of engagement can be exasperating.

The public / private sphere, for example. Many of us use different networks for different purposes. For me, the asynchronous follow functionality of Twitter means I’m happy to follow people I don’t know (either online or in real life) and vice versa. For LinkedIn, because being connected to someone implies that I know and respect someone professionally to such a degree as to want to be associated with them – with the subtle hint of endorsement – I don’t connect with randoms unless I know enough about them. My Facebook account is private because I only use it for sharing and keeping in contact with real-life friends (and also because I can’t control what photos of me other people may post, and I don’t want personal photos of drunken nights out to be made public) – so I don’t ‘friend’ randoms. Same for Foursquare – I don’t want anyone but people I know and trust in real life to know where I am, so if I don’t know you, I’m not going to add you as a friend on Foursquare.

And it drives me up the wall when I get random strangers trying to ‘friend’ me on Facebook or Foursquare. It shouldn’t. They don’t know my personal preferences for social networks. But in my head, it’s perfectly obvious. If I don’t know you, why do you want to know where I am? And why would I be OK with you knowing where I am?

And even once you’ve got past who you do and don’t ‘friend’, then you get to what’s an acceptable way to use the service. The number of ‘No I don’t want your stupid application‘ groups shows that lots of us find the way others choose to use the service utterly infuriating.

[who actually does want to be a Zombie?]

Same goes with Twitter. There are no rules for how to use Twitter – there’s no right and wrong. But we all have our own personal views on what we deem acceptable and what’s not.

Meg’s post ‘A list of things that will get you removed from my Twitter list‘ is a great example of this.

I’m the same. Certain things drive me barmy. Re-tweeting yourself (egotistical self indulgence). Autoposting your blog posts to your Twitter feed (I have an RSS feed). Saying ‘please RT’ (if it’s good I’ll RT it, if it’s not I won’t). Constant self promotion (see RT-ing yourself). Autoposting your Foursquare location (see autoposting blog posts – if we’re Foursquare friends I’ll already know where you are. And if I turned pings off it was for a reason. I can’t turn your bloody Foursquare tweets off without unsubscribing to your entire feed).

But that’s just my own preferences. I’ve got no justification for getting riled at people when they break my ‘rules’ because they’re not my rules. They’re not rules full stop.

And other people have very different views. Where I find auto-tweeting blog posts excruciatingly self indulgent and bordering on the spammy, other people have observed that it annoys them when people don’t tweet their blog posts, as they rarely check their RSS reader and they like using their Twitter stream as pseudo-RSS feed. (To get round this one I set up a separate Twitter account for this blog so that those who want to get my posts auto-tweeted can, but my regular followers who don’t aren’t spammed every time I publish a blog post).

When there are no rules, we have to work out what’s acceptable by ourselves. And given that we can’t always agree what we find acceptable from our own friends, it means where brands are concerned, a further degree of caution is required. We’re more forgiving of our friends breaking our unspoken and unofficial rules – less so of brands.

There’s no hard and fast way to avoid pissing someone off. But the credo of ‘don’t be an asshole’ and ‘do as you would be done by’ helps.