Tag, You're It!What to do when old photos of you appear on Facebook.
Posted Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at 12:07 PM ET
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StumbleUponAs with any new frontier, the rules of engagement can be vague. Fortunately, there is Debrett's, which is publishing the A to Z of Modern Manners, the first of their etiquette guides to tackle social networking, in the United States next month. Its author is Jo Bryant, a chipper Brit who thinks that "people are confused about what's right and wrong and how far you can go" on sites like Facebook. "It is a whole new code of behavior that we need to get to grips with." Even digital natives have been known to struggle: Last month Chelsy Davy changed her relationship status on Facebook, inadvertently triggering a tabloid feeding frenzy because she was no longer seeing her boyfriend of five years, Prince Harry. More recently, the now infamous Chris Brown confirmed his split from Rihanna by changing his relationship status to "single," according to the New York Post.
Bryant, who has herself been tagged on Facebook "but nothing bad, thankfully," agreed that I would probably be overreacting if I were to detag the offending photo. She did offer advice to would-be taggers. "Just because you're online you shouldn't forget how your actions might make someone else feel," she says. "That's really what manners and etiquette are all about." So finally I called Caroline and asked her, as politely as possible, just what the hell her deal was. Turns out she had just gotten a scanner and, she says, has "a ton of free time right now," so she went on a bit of a scanning and tagging binge.
Caroline told me that she's had her own unfortunate pre-digital photo scanned and tagged, and therefore claims to be "very sensitive" on the topic. "I got my tag cherry popped because this girl from my boarding school put up all these photos and they were amazing and I was so happy to see them," she says. "Then she tagged me in one and I was embarrassed and self-conscious that all my cool new friends were going to see that I was fat in high school. I was going to remove the tag but I didn't want her to feel insulted. I wasn't sure what to think of it."
What she ended up concluding is probably the best—and hardest—lesson Facebook has to offer. Once you start reconnecting with people from your distant past, even if fleetingly online, your life goes from feeling like a patchwork of acquaintances and experiences to something more fluid and cohesive. This can be humbling. Or, as Caroline said when I whined to her about posting that photo: "You can never be too cool for your past."
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