Tonight I found out through one of my best friends that this fair-weather acquaintance of mine ended our friendship. No she didn’t call me or text me or email me. She Facebook de-friended me. I couldn’t have cared any less, but I found it absolutely hilarious that anyone thinks that Facebook is the same as real life.
I really don’t know how this happened but it seems to be a common occurrence. How did our society get to the point where perusing someone’s online profile makes you believe you know people intimately, or comments on a wall can change the way you think about someone?
“Did you hear they were dating?”
“No, is it official on Facebook?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh well, then it can’t be true.”
I can’t say that I am 100% guilt free of this behavior. I am on Facebook all the time. I just don’t understand why we can’t treat it as a way to share our lives with those we know well. Instead, people friend thousands of strangers, while simultaneously exposing intimate details about their lives.
Lately, I have started deleting non-friends/family members/co-workers from my profile. Here are my criteria for keeping you in my friend list:
1. We have had a conversation in person
2. I have seen you or spoken to you in 3 years
3. You would say hi to me if we ran into each other
I know. It doesn’t look like a lot, but you would be surprised how many people on your friend list wouldn’t meet these criteria.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
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I had a similar thing happen recently, only, the de-friending was all done in Facebook, and it was mutual. Like, a conversation two people should be having in real life was had on Facebook PM. Argument, heatedness, and the Facebook de-friending was kind of a punctuation on the whole sorry affair.
ReplyDeleteThen a chain effect, where other friends of ours de-friended each of us according to longest alliances held. We'll no doubt encounter one another at some gathering or other and feel uncomfortable that there's no screen and a couple of hundred feet of cable between us.
But, it's a social networking site, real friends drop off it, and real friends account for a tiny percentage. FB friends vanish in the electronic wind and you know you're doing someting right when you have no idea who's gone missing from your Friends list, you just know that number used to be higher.
But as to the 123 criteria, meh. You create lists: Friends, Family, Random Adds, Met in France etc. The other 4,698 go in Others, maybe they get promoted from Others if you randomly hit them up and end up having a wail of a convo with them.
FB friend culling is something you see declared on loads of FB users' status. "I've had enough, this is shit! I'm removing everyone I don't know." Check a random Add Me Group three days later, and there they are - FB User: Add me please! *heart*