Please, keep it to yourself.

I am not a Facebook enthusiast as such as I don't really post status updates on my personal  profile there and don't comment on friends' walls either. I mean there is only so much you can say about the scones Auntie Muriel baked or the Joneses' holidays pictures in Southend. Topics like that are only of interest to their originators, no offence meant to Auntie Muriel or the Joneses.

But I like browsing groups after my own interests: the posts are often inspiring and informative in FB groups and this must be one of the features of  the site that I like the most.

However, I have noticed a trend recently that I find annoying: members of those group posting about the death or hospitalisation of their relatives. I don't know them and don't know their family members and while I can sympathise to some degree with their predicaments and bereavements, I feel that I am being exposed to information that I simply don't want to see and don't want to have shared with me. It feels a bit like this: 'Hi, I don't know you and you don't know me but I thought you may want to know my brother-in-law died this morning. So you could share the burden of mourning him with me even though you've never even met in and didn't know him.'

Before these social networks existed, people would notify their immediate circle of friends and family about the death of a family member and possibly their professional circle since it is quite normal to notify your boss, colleagues, associates, employees, etc. They didn't go and tell strangers on the street for example. We are mutual strangers online: I wouldn't go and make announcements of deaths in my own circle of friends and relatives to people I don't know and who don't know me.

Online social networks are completely changing the dynamics of interaction among people and doing so in deplorable ways. And it doesn't matter how old or young users are: they adopt behaviours that would be awkward and bordering on unacceptable in real life. So why do it online?

Again, I understand losing a loved one is painful, traumatic, etc but please: if we don't know each other and will never ever meet in real life, keep it to yourself.