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Face threats  Do you know what that is?  I'd never heard the term before and it confused me a little.  Until I realized it meant what people think about you on social media. There's another phrase, too.  Impression management.  That's a little easier to understand.  Impression management refers to an individual's deliberate efforts to control or influence other people's perceptions. Sometimes impression management occurs in reaction to face threats: unfavorable incidents that undercut a person's ability to cultivate and maintain a desirable self-image on social networking sites (SNSs). You know?  Like bragging about your new boyfriend who's a doctor and your friend posts that he's really a dentist.  That happened to me.   SNSs such as Facebook, where content can be shared widely and is often persistent, studies have repeatedly shown that people are vulnerable to face threats resulting from things that others post, according ...

So everyone thought all we had to do to make driving while talking on a cell phone safer was to remove our hands.  Big joke. It's our minds that we have to remove when we're doing that.  I always wondered why the big deal about hands-free cell phones when it's the talking that's distracting, not the damn holding of the phone.  And it appears it's not limited to calls, but sending texts with Apple Siri or Google Now smart phone personal assistants.  Even just speaking into your phone to give a command slices our attention in half. Now a study has finally found that it takes up to 27 seconds to regain full attention after issuing voice commands, according to newswise.com.  University of Utah researchers discovered this in a pair of new studies for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. I mean, it makes sense.  When I'm talking to someone -- whether in person or on a cell -- I'm totally in the conversation.  I don't notice if a car is about to si...

This is kind of surprising.  Shy people use Facebook longer, but disclose less on it. According to a new study , it’s the quiet ones who are logging in longer, says an assistant professor in the Communications Arts Department at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) at newswise.com. “The shy people spend more time on Facebook, but they disclose less information,” says Dr. Pavica Sheldon, who has done several studies on use of the social media site by university students.  "I'll poke you. You'll poke me!" Self-disclosure, social attraction, predictability and trust are important predictors of Facebook relationships, says another expert. Makes sense to me.  I must confess, I'm a bit of a coward when it comes to confronting people.  But I do it well on the Web.  It's much easier to say things (but sometimes unwise) in writing than face-to-face.  I don't think I'd ever break up with someone by texting but I hear it's been done.  A l...

I hate Facebook. Not the site itself but all the fun I’m missing. Last year I was devastated to read about a neighborhood party we weren’t invited to, all the pictures of people dancing and drinking, and having a really good time. Or the vacation another friend took when I thought she was right here in Stamford , struggling through the snow like the rest of us. Or the picture showing another friend ramming into her husband in bumper cars.  It reminds me of all the parties with the cool kids I wasn’t invited to in high school. I was quiet and mousy in those days, and didn’t smoke or drink or do anything that was even remotely cool. (It’s only now, bumping into old friends, that I’m finding out some thought I was, well, attractive.) But that’s another column.  I read once that people put on Facebook what they want others to think is happening in their lives.  The gourmet meals they prepare. The half-marathons they run in record time (sorry, Paul Ryan)....