The *Other* Complete Idiot's Guide

Regular readers of this blog may remember the time I shared the story of my abandoned dream of becoming a Complete Idiot author.  To illustrate how far along I'd gotten (not very), I posted two sets of excerpts I'd written for the (incomplete) Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials (one and two).

I also mentioned that I had started a second Complete Idiot project around the same time:  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Social Media Etiquette.  Though my Millennial guide was interesting enough that I later wished that I had finished it simply so that I, personally, could read it, the social media guide did not withstand the test of time quite so well.  Thus I didn't share anything from it.

Until now.

The words below were written less than four years ago, but their entertainment value comes almost exclusively from their outrageous dated-ness (starting with the fact that it was called "social networking" back then).  Well, that, and my resolute insistence on dictating who you should and should not friend on Facebook.  If there's anything to be said about Becky Heineke circa 2011, it's that she was looking for a little control in her life.  And here we are able to see how she wanted to exert that control over you and your stupid "virtual alcohol."

Enjoy!

Part I:  Welcome to the World of Social Networking

Chapter 1:  What is Social Networking

The term “social networking” is thrown around a lot in these modern times we live in.  Friending, poking, following, and connecting are only a few of the words that have had their meanings expanded in recent years.

What does it all mean?

It means that when it comes to the way we interact with people, things are changing.  And with that change comes a whole new set of rules and expectations on how to correspond. 

Creating a Profile

Name and Profile Picture

Though this may seem like a no-brainer, different sites have different expectations.  On most any site, it’s fine to use your real name.  On Facebook, everyone is expected to use their real name.  On MySpace and Bebo, real names are slowly being phased in after years of users traditionally sticking to screennames.   

Presenting Yourself Online

In the real world, when you meet someone face-to-face, the interaction is active.  No matter how well prepared you are, you can’t foresee everything a stranger will do or say, and thus there is a level of uncertainty.  The same is true of the person you’re

Congratulations, you are online!

interacting with:  for both of you, the interaction itself is dependent upon the reactions of the other person.

Online, the initial interaction is always passive.  A profile looks the same to every person who views it (notwithstanding differences that come about because of privacy settings...but that’s another matter entirely). 

Let’s say that after reading this book, you’re interested in learning more about me (I’m feeling narcissistic in choosing my examples today).  MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, take your pick.  You look me up.  You find my profile and you see a carefully crafted image of me as an individual.  You see the same profile picture that everyone else sees and you see the same personal facts and interests, too. 

Every piece of information at your disposal has been hand-chosen by me.  I decided which picture I wanted, I decided how many of my interests to share, I even decided whether or not to divulge if I’m married or single, how old I am, what my occupation is, and any host of other private details, many of which would be far too private to ask me about if we happened to meet as strangers on the street.  (MySpace, for instance, famously has an option to disclose your annual income.)

Social networking sites create the illusion of active interaction by allowing us the option to communicate with each other whether privately (in e-mail-like private messages or instant messaging, sometimes called “chatting”) or publicly (like on our walls).

But the major difference between online communication and the real world variety is that we have the option to choose.  Maybe you looked at one of my profiles and decided that was all you needed to know about me.  I effectively introduced myself to you without ever being aware of it, and I never will know anything about you.  I won’t even know that you exist...

Virtual Gifts:  They Don’t Count Like the Real Thing!
What is a "virtual gift," you may ask?  It’s exactly what it sounds like.  It’s not an actual balloon with “Happy Birthday!” written across it; it’s a tiny graphical representation of one.

Actual value of fake Coors Light shown above.

Virtual gifts seem to be declining somewhat in popularity since their arrival on the scene late in the first decade of the 2000s.  There was a time when it was quite common to log into a site and see that someone had “sent” you a bouquet of flowers, or even a beer.  It seems, though, that virtual gifts were the odd exception to the rule that “it’s the thought that counts.”  You can’t smell a jpg of a bouquet any more than you can drink a clip art beer.

Lest you come off as a cheapskate or antisocial for not coming through with the real thing, virtual gifts are best given in moderation.  (Or avoided altogether.)

Friend Requests

More and more people are joining Facebook, and the variety of users is endless.  Just looking at the aspect of friend requests, the differences between people is staggering.  There are the people who friend everyone they’ve ever met, those who friend only people they’re actually friends with, and some who don’t friend anyone at all, but instead wait for other people to friend them.   

What type of Facebook friend-er you are isn’t important for our purposes, but it is helpful to think of people in real-world terms when it comes to friend requests.  Did that creepy guy you met last night at a bar send you a request?  It’s okay to deny him.  (You would in real life!) 

Friending People You Don’t Know

In general, friending should be limited to people you know.  Period.  It would give you pause if a stranger came up to you on the street and asked to see pictures of you from last weekend, right?  It’s just as unsettling online.  Remember that you’re giving your Facebook friends access to enormous amounts of personal information, and, likewise, you’re asking for access to that information in return when you send a friend request. 

That’s a lot (too much) to ask of someone you don’t know.

Friending People You Sort Of Know

Never assume that someone you’ve had minimal contact with knows why you’re friending them.  Facebook allows you to send a personal

message with a friend request, and it also gives you the opportunity to send a message to someone without sending a friend request.

Your author, who, in a previous life, was a popular blogger, often got requests from readers who made no effort to introduce themselves.  It was frustrating; I didn’t want to offend those who enjoyed what I wrote, but I also didn’t want to open up my private life to people who had made no effort to reach out to me on a personal level. 

I’ve also gotten requests from people I not only don’t know, but can’t figure out why they want to be friends.  Unless you’re positive that you’re sending a request to someone who knows who you are, always include a message of some sort with your request.

And when in doubt, assume the worst and explain who you are.  You and I both know you’re fascinating and memorable, but the person you’re trying to friend may not.

[CHART – When to Send a Request and When to Just Message]

Rule of Thumb:  Sending a friend request is not the same thing as introducing yourself.  Introducing yourself is the same as introducing yourself.  Remember, when you send a friend request, the person you send it to doesn’t have access to your full profile, nor should you expect he or she to spend the time trying to figure out who you are.

Are You Being Obsessive?* 

Remember that your actions on Facebook are visible to everyone in your network of friends.  Every action you make, from commenting on a picture or leaving a message on someone’s wall to hitting the “Like” button on Nick Lachey's fan page, will be reported on your wall...

(*Note: You may not be obsessive, but I sure was to think all this through.)

Other topics slated for discussion but never expanded upon include:

- The internet is permanent!  Think before you create.
- Responding too quickly and what it says about you.  
- Creepy People:  Low-Key is Key When Getting Rid of Them

- Poking.  It’s stupid.  But we still have to deal with it.
- Game Invites:  No, I do not want to be part of your Mafia!   - Geotagging:  Assume Those You’re With Don’t Want to Be Stalked

Woman on computer HERE, virtual gift icon HERE, friend request cancellation HERE.

More from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials!

By popular demand...

Embracing Your Millennialism

Congratulations, you're already being replaced. (1)

No matter how old you are right now, you’re getting older.  You may have kids.  Or your friends may have kids.  Another generation is already working its way into our global consciousness.  And look at you.  Until you picked up this book, you weren’t even entirely sure your generation had a name.

In a society that increasingly relies on snapshots of information to define identities (think of your profile on a social networking site), Millennials at first glance don’t seem to have the collective personality that, say, the Baby Boomers do.  The term “Baby Boomer” conjures up specific images of psychedelic colors and war protests and crazy hair at rock concerts.  “Millennials” probably doesn’t conjure up much of anything.  Part of that likely stems from a general inability to agree on who belongs to this generation.  Many place the starting point at 1982, but depending on the expert in question, birth dates range anywhere from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s.  No wonder, then, that this is a generation that seems to lack a solid identity.

[Because all Complete Idiot's Guides come with ample illustrative material, my outline is full of potential future imagery.]

Gratuitous royalty shot. (2)

Chart – Famous Millennials

Prince William and Prince Harry – The Studly Royal Millennials

Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan – The Train-Wreck Starlet Millennials

Heath Ledger – The Gone-Too-Soon Millennial

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian – The Why-Are-They-Famous Millennials

[...]

Applying for a Job

When applying for a job, one must approach the process as one approaches a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Do you intend to pursue a career in the field in which you majored?  If yes, congratulate yourself on being more self-aware than most of your peers were when choosing a major.  If no, proceed to the next paragraph.

Unlike in previous generations, today’s job applicants can expect to hop from job to job, even from career to career, over the course of a lifetime.  While there is much admiration to be given to those of us who “find their calling” early in life, there is no shame in feeling lost and/or deciding after graduation/mid-interview-circuit/mid-career that what you thought you wanted isn’t working for you.  In addition to being tech-savvy and self-confident, we are also a generation of choice.

Some people have all the luck. (3)

Remember the good old days (medieval Europe) when you grew up knowing you were going to be a shoemaker because your dad and your dad's dad and every other generation of your family were shoemakers?  

And then your job had purpose because you were the only person in your village who knew how to make shoes?  No longer!  The complicated world in which we live has necessitated into existence lots of jobs that are boring and/or stupid.  Sure, now we've got that whole "free will" thing going for us, but with all the options out there, how could one possibly choose? And really, what could ever compare to the satisfaction of dressing the feet of an entire community?

Nowadays, there are lots of ways to make money that don’t have any real significance in terms of contributing to society.  And there is a trend in millennialism for Millennials to make other Millennials feel guilty about the ways in which they earn their income.  But let’s face it:  With 7 billion people on the planet, not all of us are going to be doing something for the common good.  Focus on what makes you happy (as long as what makes you happy is within legal boundaries).

[...]

Online Fame:  How It Both Is and Is Not Like Actual Fame

Now that you’re blogging and tweeting all the time and have your own Facebook fan page, you may have attracted a following.  And it may have gone to your head.  And you may be filled with feelings of triumph because for a Millennial, fame is the ultimate currency of success.

You live in an era in which the thrill of fleeting fame on the internet is more attainable than ever.  But just like fame in the real world, the key word is “fleeting.”  It’s much more common to be a one hit internet wonder than to launch a fulfilling career from your online notoriety.  Not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s best to have realistic expectations of how far your fame will take you based on what it is you’ve become famous for.

[What happens next?!  I don't know, because I never wrote it.  And to be entirely honest, I never wrote it in part because I was a little bit too right about the worthless nature of online fame and also that part about having to work for money even if, in doing so, you're not really contributing anything.

How ironic that The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials was never finished because the Millennial who was writing it had to continue living her adulthood exactly as she was trying to describe in the book.]

(1) Baby pic from lpaustin.com.
(2) Princes from usmagazine.com.
(3) Serf doing hard labor from this blog.

My "Complete Idiot's Guide" That Never Was

In February of 2011, I went to the Complete Idiot's Guide website and saw that they were soliciting book proposals.  Thrilled beyond words (at the time, I could think of nothing more exciting than seeing my name under the words "complete idiot" on a book cover), I asked my friends and family, both in person and on Facebook, what topic they considered me an expert on (i.e., what topic I could most swiftly and easily churn out a book on).  Of the many suggestions I got (and of those for which guides had not already been written), I narrowed it down to two:  social media etiquette (huh) and "Adulthood for Millennials."

I quite earnestly started both books and equally earnestly abandoned them after deciding I was perhaps not a true expert on either.  But here is a tiny taste of one of the two, in what might have one day become The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials:

(Complete Idiot's Guides always start with a letter to the reader.)

Dear Twentysomething,

Well done!  You have survived into your “early adulthood” in the modern world.  Much has been made in recent times about the Millennial Generation, those of us born sometime roughly in the eighties or nineties and coming of age roughly around the millennial mark.  If Generation X was all angst and grunge and inner turmoil, then we Millennials are defined by our relentless optimism and

hopeless fascination with fame and technology.  We are the “Me Generation,” raised to value our personal happiness and to celebrate our individuality.  And we are coming of age in a world that is full of people who weren’t raised the way we were.

This book approaches the topic of “growing up” from the practical standpoint that in the modern world, no generation can be defined by the generations before or after it.  Our parents didn’t need to know how to make a LinkedIn profile after they graduated from college any more than the next generation will need to be taught basic computer skills in school.

As a member of the Millennial generation, I’ve found that the transition from adolescence to the “real world” hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be.  And amidst all the self-help books and generation-deprecating memoirs out there, there weren’t any practical guides to basic Millennial issues.  Getting a job is one thing…but how do you handle older co-workers who are constantly asking you for tech advice?  And while we’re bombarded with ads warning against our future wrinkles, no one thinks to prepare us for the moment when our childhood icons start showing up as “vintage characters” in trendy clothing stores.  And, really, how are you supposed to pick a grad school (or career) when society can’t even settle on a social networking site we all agree on?

Some of the advice in here is given with the understanding that there are plenty of books out there that offer endless advice about major issues, like jobs and relationships, though those topics are covered here too.  But mainly what I wanted to present was a guide to the things that only Millennials have to deal with.  We are, after all, a generation first and foremost concerned with ourselves.

So revel in your uniqueness! And enjoy the read…

Becky Heineke

  

Introduction

Congratulations!  You are now old enough to be considered a “responsible and self-sustaining citizen” by the unsuspecting public.  Now what?

No doubt you’ve spent your formative years being told that a college education is all you need to succeed in this world.  Unfortunately, a bachelor’s degree isn’t what it used to be.  And neither is your infantile adulthood.  Many obstacles face you before you can truly call yourself a grown-up:  employment, maintaining friendships via the prickly world of social networking, pet ownership...  Luckily for you, there are lots of books already on the market that deal with many of these challenges. 

Unluckily for you, they’ve probably been written by people much older than you who have had far different life experiences than you.

So first, we must determine whether or not you are a Millennial.

The millennial generation, aside from being ultra-hip and pop-culture forward, has a couple of defining characteristics:

Mashable.com stock photo of The Millennial Human

- Millennials grew up in the “can do” era.  Remember the participation ribbons you got just for showing up to track meets once a week?  Remember the Reagans telling you you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up?  Your Baby Boomer parents didn’t get that when they were kids.

- Millennials are the first generation in history to grow up as “digital natives.”  We’re also the last generation in history who – barring a cataclysmic technological breakdown - will be able to remember a time before the internet was part of our daily lives (though for some of us, remembering back that far might be a little hazy).  The people who study these sorts of things liken it as similar to learning a language as you grow, as opposed to picking it up much later in life.  Your parents, for instance, probably find computers to be less intuitive than you do.  They learned the ins and outs of computing long after they were already adults, whereas Millennials grew up with and around advances in technology.

Though we have yet to see the impact on the next generation, who is being born into a world more wired than ever before, what that generation won’t have is the perspective that Millennials do in terms of how quickly things have changed.  You may have grown up staring at screens, but you also remember how much those screens have changed over the years.  Each of you can probably remember the first time you got on the internet, what it was like to make the switch from dial-up to broadband, and how people communicated before everyone had a cell phone (remember car phones?).  Touchscreen navigation may make perfect sense to you, but you also remember that there was a time when Mario was two-dimensional and pixilated. 

That inherent talent for technology, combined with an appreciation for what life was like before it, makes our generation truly unique.  And if there’s anything to be said about being unique, it’s that other people don’t always understand where you’re coming from.

[Twelve pages of outlines (on topics as diverse as "Fictional Icons of Our Childhood" and "Common Office Personalities and How to Deal with Them") and a section on job advice later (yes, for some reason I was giving job advice)...]

Blogging

There are few activities as wholesomely ego-stroking as delivering a good blog entry.  Though blogs exist on nearly every subject

imaginable, the personal blog – one written about the author’s life – remains a popular way to convey detailed information to family and friends.  Lacking the word count limit of Facebook or Twitter updates, and allowing the author to post pictures within the body of the text, a blog is like a memoir that’s being written and published in real time.

Consider blogging if you are: 

1. Wordy.

2. Excessively narcissistic. 

Consider Facebook if you are:

1. Alive.  Let’s face it.  Everyone’s on Facebook.

Consider MySpace if you are:

1. Stuck in the past.  Let’s face it.  MySpace is dead.

Consider Twitter if you are:

1. Unable to punctuate and/or spell. 

2. Enjoy hashtags.

Consider LinkedIn if you are:

1. Boring. 

2. A nerd.

3. Legitimately looking for a job.  (Unlike most other networking sites, this one does have an air of professionalism about it.) 

[And then there were some more pages, with topic headings like "The Perils of Facebook," "Emoticons:  As Complex as Real Emotions Nowadays," and "Online Fame:  How It Is Both Like and Is Not Like Actual Fame".  I may post more of this in the future.  I really wish I'd known enough to write this book because I'D KIND OF LIKE TO READ IT, MAN.]