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Source: ONE News
A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook.
I don't want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my
candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly
know.
Can I ignore their invite?
"Can I be your friend?" might work as an ice-breaker among small
children, but it's not a question you hear often between adults, at
least not outside of Las Vegas.
Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that
evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval
need to share your neighbor's power tools.
Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of
the schoolyard.
Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after
we've become friends in the real world, many of us are using
Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship
building.
Why bother asking someone you've just met questions about their
family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you
can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your
Facebook news feed?
And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we
meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.
If you like the person, perhaps because they brought an excellent
bottle of wine to the party, then you can accept the request in the
hope of further opportunities to sample the contents of their
cellar.
If you didn't get to taste the wine because they accidentally
spilled the bottle over your brand new party dress, then etiquette
experts would probably agree that you can decline the friend
request, send them a dry-cleaning bill and humiliate them in a
derisory posting to your real Facebook friends.
In the workplace, however, the dynamic is very different.
The consequences of offending someone by ignoring their friend
request are greater with a colleague you see every day than with a
careless dining companion you may never meet again.
So why are people you work with increasingly offering to share
their Facebook output?
Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher who studies social software
in the workplace, said it's partly because some people just don't
anticipate the ramifications of sharing their personal life with
colleagues.
But it's also a function of the Facebook interface, which
recommends other people for you to friend.
"Once you've connected to one person you work with you get
recommendations to connect to others that you work with," she
said.
Of course, many people don't have a problem with being Facebook
friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for
those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate,
there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend
request.
One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook's privacy
settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new
friend.
To do this, you can create a colleagues list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend.
Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the Profile
Information section to control what information people on the
colleagues list can see.
An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is
to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a
social network for professional relationships.
"You can just go ahead and ask them to join you on LinkedIn and
hope they forget they sent you a Facebook friend request," said
Pachter, the author of New Rules ú Work.
"Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I'm keeping Facebook for my
family and friends. I'm asking you to join me on my professional
network instead.'"
Pachter said that whatever you do, it's important not to offend
your colleague - and that's not just because politeness is good
etiquette.
"The person you offend might end up being your boss next year," she
said.
Richard Baum is the global editor, consumer media for Reuters. The opinions expressed are his own.
