Susie Boniface - The Bluffers Guide to Social Media

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SUSIE BONIFACE is a writer and journalist who tripped over social media while writing an award-winning anonymous blog under the pseudonym Fleet Street Fox. She now writes a regular column under that name for the Mirror but is no longer quite so anonymous. She has worked all over Fleet Street as both staff and freelance reporter news agencies, tabloids, broadsheets, daily and Sunday papers. She says she gets more readers these days online, thanks largely to Twitter and Facebook.

Recently she wrote a book entitled The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox, about the sex and scandals the newspapers dont report. It was described by broadcaster Jeremy Vine as The first book Ive read that starts at 90mph and speeds up. When shes not writing, Susie lectures in journalism at several universities and tells anyone wholl listen that using social media is just like going to the pub. Shes a big fan of Bluffers Guides because they usually turn out to be right.

I nstantly acquire all the knowledge you need to pass as an expert in the world of social media. Know what to say, what not to say, what to post, what not to post, and what excuses to make if you dont know the difference between a tweet and a dweet, or even a retweet (which, any tweeple worth their salt will know is always called an RT). Never again confuse a LOL with an ROFL, a selfie with a shelfie, or Godwins Law with the Streisand Effect. Bask in the admiration of your fellow social media aficionados as you pronounce confidently on the chances of Facebook going the way of Friends Reunited and Bebo, and why MySpace could be the Casio keyboard of the 21st century.

Above all dont hold back when it comes to saying what you really think of trolls, pointing out that there has never yet been one who had a healthy mental attitude, a steady job and the requisite intelligence to write anything worth reading.

DO ASK Whats the point of Tumblr?

DONT SAY Ive got this great idea for a blog on cats that look like biscuits.

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Website: bluffers.com

Twitter: @BluffersGuide

First published 2015

Copyright Bluffers 2015

Publisher: Thomas Drewry

Publishing Director: Brooke McDonald

Series Editor: David Allsop

Design and Illustration: Jim Shannon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Bluffers.

A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Bluffers Guide, Bluffers and Bluff Your Way are registered trademarks.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.

Andy Warhol

SOCIAL INTERCOURSE

Y ou will often hear people complain that before the invention of social media, people used to talk. They used to meet in normal ways; there was none of this sexting business; we had friends before Facebook, you knowor at least, thats what my dad tells me.

In fact, what people used to do before social media was socialise using different media: cave paintings, storytelling, gossip, smoke signals, carving initials in trees. Updating your Facebook status about your lunchtime ham sandwich is much the same as prehistoric man leaving a handprint on the cave wall to tell everyone hed caught a really big bison.

And thats the trick to successfully bluffing your way in the confusingly high-tech world of internet networking and sharing: realising that it is really no different to every other way in which human beings talk to and about one another.

As a species, humans have always wanted to share information and the reason social networking services like Foursquare, Twitter and Vine are so popular is because they make it easier than ever before. Where once you had to corner someone in the next cave to boast about who you just snogged, today you can put a picture on Instagram and shout it to the whole world.

While some welcome the mass exchange of information, others mistrust technological developments for fear they make us less human. Charles Dickens, confronted with the development of the telegraph, said: Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Which ironically is the perfect 140-character length for a tweet (if you lose a full stop).

So when someone wants to bore you rigid complaining about social media being the death of proper talking, point out to them that apes grunt, Homo erectus had basic symbolic communication, and Homo sapiens uttered the first words sometime between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago. If anyone should be in any doubt about this, remind them that humankind is a storytelling species and is unique in that regard.

In the 1960s, some Californian geeks began linking their computers together in what became known as the internet and in 1982 Britains Tim Berners-Lee developed a way of getting around it with addresses, links and readable pages the World Wide Web. At this point, the evolution of human communication sped up exponentially, with email in 1993, blogging shortly after, Facebook launching in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.

Four years later the internet went into warp drive, when astronaut T.J. Creamer sent a tweet unassisted from the International Space Station in orbit above the Earth.

And here we are, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, at the point where any of us can have a long online conversation with someone on the other side of the world who weve never met, and simultaneously read the news, share amusing animal pictures, watch porn, and farm jelly beans competitively, all while our boss thinks were working hard.

Of course, your boring pals might have the wit to point out that were so busy with all these distractions that we merely grunt at our nearest and dearest, which means evolution has sped ahead so far its actually gone backwards in time. If they do, you can respond with AHA! Social media invented time travel too! and after that theyll probably give up and leave you alone.

While what we say is much the same as its always been, the way we do it is changing at an alarming rate. From a handful of academic web pages in 1969, there were a billion websites in 2014, a number which has dipped since then but is expected to grow again in 2016. About 75 per cent of them are inactive but there are still about 100 web pages for every man, woman and child on earth. About 2.4 billion people use the internet, most of them in Asia. Population penetration varies widely between countries and continents, with 78 per cent of Americans online compared to just 15 per cent of Africans.

And its not just for youngsters. One in four people over the age of 65 uses social media; 35 per cent of couples who married in the USA between 2005 and 2012 met via social media; and one in five divorces is blamed on Facebook. This is, increasingly, how we live online, where theres little privacy, constant data harvesting and ever-lurking trolls.