Facebook 101

When I'm on Facebook, I get the feeling I'm being immersed in a different culture. I'm not multi-lingual enough to have much Facebook experience in anything other than English, but it seems that no matter which English-speaking country its "friends" are from, Facebook has a way of of corralling everyone into certain protocols, language patterns, and forms of address. In other words, it messes with the ways we might otherwise interact.

Facebook allows users to reply to one another, and when you tap "reply," to respond to someone's comment, Facebook auto-fills the other person's name. As a stickler for punctuation, I often take the extra two seconds required to insert a comma after the name before typing my reply. If I don't do that, I am nagged by the notion that I have just contributed to the breakdown of written language in Western civilization. I think Facebook should include the comma in the auto-fill so I no longer have to take time out of a busy day to either add the comma or contemplate the damage caused when I left it out. 

Many of us also use our middle names, maiden names, married names, and hyphenates of all of the above when on Facebook. This can cause a stilted lilt in our Facebook conversations. Consider:

A woman posts a picture of herself with a trendy short haircut. Such photos are usually selfies taken in the poster's car immediately after leaving the salon. One of her Facebook friends comments that the haircut has a "cute little David Cassidy vibe going on." The woman fires back with, "Emma Jane Zelinski-Masterson-Whalberg, you think I look like a guy?!?"

In its ongoing effort to clarify users' communications even further, Facebook offers a collection of emojis for reacting to a post. The options are a thumbs up, a heart, a laughing face, an awestruck face, a crying face, and a scowl-y, angry face. Facebook used to offer only the thumbs up, aka the "like" button, but broadened the choices when users found it off-putting to "like" their friends' heart-wrenching posts about the death of a beloved pet and the other kinds of heartbreaks we all endure in life. 

That just made me think of something else. Say one of my Facebook friends goes skiing at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. He breaks his foot and posts a picture of his bruised-up toes peeking from a cast. His post says he'll have to spend the next ten days recuperating in front of a roaring fire while drinking brandy. If I tap the heart to send my love, will people think I'm happy about the broken foot? Probably not.

But how will they know for sure?