Social anxiety is “an experience of anxiety (emotional discomfort, fear, apprehension or worry) regarding social situations and being evaluated by other people”. Sounds familiar?
As popularity and use of social websites magnify, social anxiety is shifting to the social web. Wired’s how-to-wiki has even come up with a detailed set of Facebook etiquette rules. These include:
One should not friend another whom they have no association or connection with whatsoever.
When speaking with someone whom you have been casually ‘facebook stalking’, try to pretend you do not know everything about them.
Drunken facebooking can get you in trouble.
And this is just the beginning. I am finding it very interesting to ask people how they discriminate between facebook friends and non-friends, what friend requests they reject/accept and what techniques they use to painlessly remove unwanted friends [1]. The bottom line is that we are all getting slightly “socially-web anxious”.
1. Towards an ontology of facebook friends? Sad.
