FACEBOOK MANNERS

I wrote the bulk of this note some years ago on Facebook. I think it applies just as much today as it did two years ago. I will add a few more observations about Facebook here. Comments are welcome and if I have offended you by this post, feel free to unfriend me on Facebook!

I have made about 150 friends on Facebook. Some I actually know; others I have not met before, but we seem to have the same interests, and there is a certain amount of communication between us, even if it amounts to nothing more than liking each other’s posts, wishing each other a happy birthday and passing the occasional comment on something that might interest us.

I have always expressed my sympathy to Facebook friends who are going through some kind of disaster in their lives, such as bereavement, loss of a job, or a relationship breaking down. Recently we had some bad luck of our own when my son-in-law lost his job because of his company being placed under provisional liquidation. He and 7000 other workers were left without a penny – no payment for the time they had worked in July, no retrenchment money, and still no sign of the eight years of pension money.

To compound the problem is the fact that there is a huge number of unemployed in South Africa and the strict Black Empowerment policy which means that white males are at the bottom of the list as far as finding new employment is concerned. My husband and I have managed to help them financially at the end of July, but we are both semi-retired, so I’m not sure how long we will be able to go on doing this. Some of my Facebook friends were kind and supportive. One kind friend even offered to send some money, which we would never dream of accepting, but we did appreciate her kind offer!

It is very true that you find out who your friends are when you have a setback like that. I’m afraid I unfriended one of our relatives who blithely continued posting junk on her wall without as much as a “sorry”!

Other “friends” ignore me –  perhaps for reasons of their own –  but why did they befriend me in the first place? Just to add to my name to the hundreds of other Facebook friends on their list?  Surely they have the strength to click the “like” button if I wish them happy birthday, or even make a very occasional comment so that I know they are still there? In this category I include some “friends” I have known personally for years. Do they look at my posts with a superior sneer and conclude that I am silly for posting them on Facebook?

March 2011 was a bad month for birthday greetings and March 2013 has not been any better. Very few of the March birthday boys and girls liked or thanked me for wishing them happy birthday. How rude is that? They obviously don’t think my well-meant birthday greetings are worth the bother of a collective “thank you” or even a “like”. The occasional “like” or “thank you” would not go amiss. At least I would not have the feeling that I’m communicating with the ether.

I share recordings, news and blog posts about my former teachers and life-long friends, Webster Booth and Anne Ziegler. I also have pages for them on Facebook and I run the <a>Booth-Ziegler Yahoo Group</a> (with only 34 members!) Anne and Webster meant a great deal to me and my intention was to keep their names alive, but this is a losing battle. I realise that their recordings are not to everyone’s taste as one of my Facebook friends told me recently – at least he was honest!  Other friends who knew them very well – two are even related to them – ignore these posts.  Just as I could always sense whether an audience was enjoying my stage performance or thinking it  pretty awful, I have the same sense on Facebook, apart from a few obvious exceptions – I would have given up a long time ago without them! My one consolation is that my recordings of Webster and Anne’s solo and duet recordings on <a>YouTube</a> are warmly received, often by people who had never heard of them before.

On the plus side, I have made some interesting new friends, followed some fascinating pages, and rediscovered some old friends who do keep in touch with me on Facebook. I hope you are in this last category!

Jean Campbell Collen – original post written in 2011/updated 7 August 2013.