Germans. They have a long, silly-sounding name for everything, including emotions that the English-speaking world has yet to identify. (Schadenfreude? Check.) It's unsurprising, then, that they already have a name for an emotion we Americans are just becoming aware of. Fremdschämen. It translates more or less to what it sounds like: "friend shame," or the condition in which one becomes embarrassed as a result of another person embarrassing himself. Some Americans call this “secondhand embarrassment,” but fremdschämen sounds worldly, intelligent, and obnoxious – so let’s use that. If you haven't heard of or experienced fremdschämen yet, you will soon. Why? Because of our new national pastime, social networking. Social networking sites have enabled us to know way more about one another than we used to. This is good for some things, like stalking (the harmless, more-than-100-yards-away-at-all-times kind). But they also make it possible to veer into the creepy, informational over-share realm. Last vacation my kindergarten crush took? Machu Picchu. Driver's ed teacher's dog's name? Bitsy. What my former coworker had for lunch? Allegedly salad, but I suspect McDonald's (super-sized). Don't get me wrong – I usually love rooting around in people's social network drawers. But sometimes I learn things about people I hardly know (second cousin Alex) that cause me to squirm (he is battling a hemorrhoids flare up again). Curiously, the online forum causes people to shed their personal information filters, so they post just about anything – even if it makes them look bad/weird/insecure/depressed/crazy/hungry to everyone else. Cue fremdschämen. Fremdschämen can manifest itself in many social networking situations. Take, for example, my recent visit to an old college friend in another city. The problem? Apparently I actually had a dozen “friends” there, to whom Facebook was happy to tattle via photo trail after my trip. This resulted in a barrage of “Wait – you were here?! How could you not tell me??” wall posts. While I felt – sort of – bad that they were hurt I didn’t see them, I found their expressing offense in this way fremdschämen-ish (new word!). Because their posts’ subtext was, "You don't care about me enough to mention that you're coming to my city, yet I care about you enough to publicly announce my hurt that you didn't tell me you were here or want to see me." With another trip looming on the horizon, and no desire to waste it speed-socializing with mere casual acquaintances but also not wanting to cause a fremdschämen pandemic, I realized I needed a game plan. One that allowed me to avoid people and awkwardness in equal measure, while also pacifying egos. (Why I care more about their egos than actually seeing them? Unclear.) So I created a system of social classification for all Facebook friends in a given city to determine whom to see, whom to not see, and how to minimize social damage. The first step was to divide friends in the other city into one of three categories: high-priority, low-priority, and no-priority. This, while possibly ruthless and Darwinian, is also just plain efficient, 90% of the battle, and hurts me more than it hurts you. Plus, the delegation to low- or no-priority groups is often based solely on the suspicion that they would put me there – despite all wall posts to the contrary. Category 1: Person I’m Visiting. You are the chosen one! Chances are that I genuinely want to see you and knew where you lived without the aid of status updates involving some city landmark (“…is thinking the Space Needle looks especially phallic today ;) ”). You’re in on the ground floor of plan-making, which, though started with vague "Come see me!" wall posts, has escalated to actual one-on-one, real-time communication. Odds are good that I knew I could count on you for some combination of tour guide/transportation/social connection/spare bed. Odds are also good that I secretly borrowed your toothbrush or used liberal amounts of your most expensive hair products in the shower. In return for temporarily revolving your tiny planet of a life around the important sun goddess existence I lead, I’ll be exceptionally fun, cool, and novel. So much so that your Bikram yoga classmate and that new guy you’re kind of seeing will be temporarily obsessed with me, friend me from their Blackberries while we’re out, pepper my wall with inside jokes, and then tag me in only the flattering pictures. Some day (okay, the day after I've left), we’ll click and comment our way fondly through these pixels of happiness, regarding them as saccharine preservatives of our shared moments. Then we'll miss each other for about a week before succumbing to the powerful vacuum of our self-centered little worlds. Fin. Now on to the other, more high-maintenance categories, full of friends that require coddling, pacifying, and straight-up lies to save us all from secondhand embarrassment. Category 2: People You Actually Do Want to See, But Not Enough to Work Your Plans Around. We’ve all made enthusiastic wall posts to this effect: “OMG we’ve got to catch up!!!!” But excessive exclamation pointing cannot mask the fact that neither of us really means it. It’s just what we say, because our feelings fall somewhere in that murky territory between loathing and adoration. So the Category 2 strategy is to issue an obligatory post right before or even during the trip: “Hi, I’m in town and would love to see you – how’s 5:54 to 6:03am Thursday morning?” (Maybe if you’d been a little cooler about the time I borrowed your beige sweater and spilled Merlot down the front you’d get a better time frame.) The beauty of this arrangement is that we both know the deal, can save face by making half-hearted attempts to meet up, and feel okay when they inevitably don’t pan out. Bam! The other advantage of being Category 2 is knowing that you’re not Category 3: People Who Only Find Out from Facebook that I’d Visited Their City and Feel Legitimately Insulted They Weren’t Notified. Again, save us all the embarrassment and don’t post something like “I can’t believe you were in town and didn’t let me know!” Don’t take it personally, it’s just that you were low-priority and I had to risk you not noticing or caring that I'd been in town. I’m actually saving us both from the inevitable awkward silences that would outweigh any decent “over coffee” conversation. I mean, it has been several summers since our eight-week internship, and even then all we ever talked about was whether or not anyone actually has photocopied their own ass, and what they did with the copies. However, if we bump into each other at a bar, I will be genuinely stoked. We’ll laugh and hug and reminisce about the time in sophomore year that you got food poisoning after drinking the melted fro-yo that had been sitting on a sunny windowsill in the lounge for a full month on a dare. But if this kind of kismet is meant to be, it will be. Best not to force it. Now. If in spite of my advice and the panicked cries from what remains of your dysfunctional filter you insist on making the awkward wall post, know that any response you get will be a lie. Possibly about how I lost your number (please don't then point out that it's posted in your profile). Or had heard from Nick who saw Karen at Mike’s wedding last month that you were doing a stint as an organic tree nut farmer in Argentina after you’d been laid off from your M&A consulting gig (okay, now that you mention it I guess I do recall that you have a severe peanut allergy). But these delicate white lies are planted like so many clover in the harsh landscape of truth to be a salve to whatever ego sting you may be experiencing, and to save everyone else from fremdschämen. So please don't pluck them out and throw them back at me for all to see. It just makes it harder. Instead, post this thought on your own brain-wall: “Oh well – guess it was an oversight.” Then let it go. Don’t subject yourself to looking through the rest of the trip pictures. The ones that look really fun and don't involve you at all. It's all part of the elaborate social waltz choreographed to prevent ugly feelings and psychological discomfort from penetrating our happy little friendspace. (Or is it mybook?) So the next time someone creates an event you blatantly weren't invited to, or cancels your date for a family emergency while simultaneously Tweeting "out with the girls!", buck up and get on with doing what these sites were created for: reading about what's on your former summer camp bunk mate's NetFlix queue and losing yourself in your third complete stranger's photo album. Because who knows, "Turkey Time! First Thanksgiving with The In-Laws" just may be the over-shared, guilty pleasure of your night. And there's nothing to be schämen about there, fremd.