Love, Karma & Self-Expression: 5 Life Lessons That We’ve Learned From Social Networking

Sometimes we wonder where we’d all be without social networking. It's a tool that has enriched our lives for the best: we can communicate with friends who are travelling, we can use it to stay aware of what’s going on in the world and we can use it to share information.

If you’re old enough to remember computers that looked like bricks, dial-up internet and plain-text websites, then chances are you grew up alongside social networking.

In many respects MySapce/Bebo/Facebook are like our siblings and, like our actual siblings, they’ve taught us some valuable life lessons over the past few years. Here are five of the main things we’ve learned from social networking...

Can you remember the start of social networking?

1. People are passive aggressive: When social networking was invented, passive aggressive people from around the world immediately started to flock to it. Why? Well it was a medium by which they could make other people feel bad about themselves in subtle ways.

You can tell the passive agressive people on your friend’s list from the non-passive agressive people by using this simple trick: if they respond to your status update about that deadly new job you’ve gotten with a sneery “Oh wow, I didn’t think they’d pick someone like you for that role. Congratulations!” then they’re totally passive aggressive and it’s probably best if you did a quick old ‘block.’

Before social networking, there was less passive aggression. Mainly because people were too afraid to say it to your face.

2. Privacy is non-existant: That drunken night out you had with your BFF that you both swore no one would ever know about? Yeah... it’s all over Facebook. That not-so-nice remark you made about that girl in the year above you in secondary school? Yeah... everyone knows about it because someone saw it on Bebo. That guy you shifted the other night? Everyone already knows because they saw him tweeting you and you checked into the cinema together on Facebook.

If anything social networking has taught us that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The only way you can maintain a small bit of it is to keep your life offline. If you don’t post about it, peple won’t know about it.

3. Karma is a b***h: Have you ever been having a creep on Facebook and accidentally ended up adding the person you were creeping as a friend? Awkward!

If it’s blatantly obvious that you’ve been stalking someone online, then there is no way to get out of that situation gracefully.

It’s like the unspoken rule of social networking that if you’re creeping on someone/talking about them, you’ll accidentally put their name as your status update. Ground, swallow us up now would you?

Always think before you hit the 'send' button on Facebook

5. People will make fun of your self-expression: If you’re a writer and you post your work on a social network, people will make fun of you. If you’re a musician and you post your music on a social network, people will make fun of you. If you’re a photographer/model/hairdresser/blogger and you post anything about it on a social network, people will make fun of you.

We’re not saying that it’s not good to get criticism on your work but on social networks people can sometimes go out of their way to be mean to you.

5. Love is the most important thing of all: From Bebo hearts to stating who you’re in a relationship with on Facebook, at the end of the day when it comes to social networking, love is the most important thing.

Do you remember the outrage when you gave your last Bebo love away to one of your friends instead of the other one? The drama!