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“Add Me” by Chumbawamba. Title speaks clearly for the theme, but the band also gives a pretty good explanation about cyber-friendships.

Facebook has managed to change the meaning of “friend” more within three or four years than the one and a half thousand years the word has existed in English. For some other languages, we can add a few more millenia for the word’s respective counterparts. A friend on Facebook is simply someone you add, provided the other party agrees. However, the breakup is much simpler.

De-friending a Facebook friend is a relatively painless process. It’s easy to do with a click of a link and no explanation is needed. Simply remove them from your friends and it’s done. There is no online equivalent of the awkward breakup dinner; no explanation is needed. If the friendship is low interaction, it may take a while for the other person to find out. For ones where there’s a higher amount of engagement, then the news arrives quicker, especially if one has just commented on your item and Facebook provides followup information. The last part is especially ironic.

I’ve been de-friended by a few people over the past few years. A couple of the “friendships” were low engagement or none at all, so not much was really lost. During a time where I had every tweet automatically sent to my Facebook profile as status updates, I can understand some people getting tired of the Twitter noise. There have been some where I wondered if it was something I said. Having a great deal of curiosity, I want to know why, but I know it’s counterproductive. They made their decision to part digital ways with me, and I have other things to worry about.

I have also dropped a few people from my digital blackbook, AKA Facebook. One person was a mutual “friend” who tried to get me involved in a drama he had with a long-time friend of mine. At first, I tried to be neutral as it was something between him and her, but this so-called mutual friend “wrote” on my “wall” his issues with my real friend (in addition to some rambling e-mails), which was embarrassing. I didn’t want this stuff broadcast to all my friends. I quickly deleted it, but I then decided to delete him too. I can’t say I regret the decision. The one annoying thing that happened was he decided to “steal” one of my friends; that is, go through my list and pick someone. Whatever.

There has only been other person, the accountant at the job that went badly. While he wasn’t responsible for my boss making the workplace a hostile one for me, he was caught in the middle. We were friends before I worked for his company, but the friendship quickly deteriorated. I’ve seen him from time to time, but we never really talked. He then “friended” me on Facebook. It was a low engagement “friendship,” but given our history and that it felt awkward to even say hello to him, I made the decision to “de-friend” him. I don’t hate him or harbor any malice, but he’s not someone I want to be trapped in an elevator with.

Perhaps I should ask myself if I want to be trapped in an elevator with the various people I’m friends with on Facebook, especially the low to no engagement ones. It might just whittle down my list to one of higher engagement and I can interact with with people I truly feel a sense of friendship with. Or, I could interact more with some people, the one of the lower or no engagement. Either option would deal with the quality of friendships, which Facebook never really seems to address. To quote Chumbawamba in a recent song, “Would you like to add me as a friend.”

Tags: Facebook, friend, social networking

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 1:05 am and is filed under blogging, communication styles, Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.