The other day an acquaintance of mine said she’s decided to simplify her life by culling her Facebook friends.
“There’s been a few who have been really ticking me off lately,” she said. ”I don’t like the tone of some of their comments and status updates.”
I looked at her and tried to gauge if she actually thought this was of some significance….as if un-friending people on Facebook really was going to make her life more enjoyable.
I know I must sound like a righteous geezer, and I’ve never, to date, had a “Facebook fight” or been maliciously stalked online but to me culling Facebook friends has roughly the same impact as deleting emails from my inbox; it’s a completely pointless exercise because the friendship doesn’t really exist in the first place.
For the past week, I’ve had this image of this woman scrolling down the head shots of her Facebook friends and contemptuously excising those whose status update weren’t up to par. ”And you, Bart from high school — I don’t really care about your hunting memoir that’s coming out from Ted Nugent Press this fall — UNFRIEND! And Debbie, well, Debbie, this is what you get for forgetting to bring me an iced decaf cap in time for yesterday’s meeting — UNFRIEND!”
The question is, what happens once the unwanted friends have been cut loose? Is there a feeling of lightness and accomplishment? Greater organization? A sense of lordly power?
Does anyone have experience with this?
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I have de-friended a few of my fb friends. Mostly because their posts were really annoying and I felt like they either had to be on meds, or should be on meds. I couldn’t read the daily..”MY life is sooooo great!!!” and then the next day..”Wondering where my life went wrong, should I even be here”.. type of posts. Seriously people, get a grip.
Did it make my life better? Probably not, but then again not reading that drivel every day has been nice!
My view on fb friends.. if I am not friends with them in “real life”, then I am not fb friends. I don’t hundreds or thousands of fb friends, so if I don’t want to listen to you complain in real life every day, I certainly don’t want to read it either.
I would like to know the same. I have seen people post a status stating things like “Ahhhhh, just trimmed the fat of my friends list – feels so good” — REALLY? Why did you friend them in the first place? Nosy much?
And I also agree with JennNY – If I am not friends with you in ‘real life’, then I am not going to accept your fake request to be a FB friend!!
I have some experience with this. I have friends on FB that I’ve met from past jobs or through other friends and I don’t care for their posts. For some reason I feel it would be mean if I deleted them off my friend list when in reality these people don’t care about me. However, FB gives you an option to hide their posts rather than deleting them all together; so I do this practice of hiding posts and then I don’t feel like a mean person for deleting them off my friend list. Now that I think about why do I let a computer application like FB have so much control over my life?!
That’s why I switched to Twitter. It seems less in intent on taking over my world.
I’ve been contemplating this culling business lately because I’ve noticed a lot of “like my status” or “post here” if you still want to be on my friends list, status updates popping up. To be friends requires action and acceptance on both parties, so obviously I have some, perhaps small, desire to be your friend so what is the deal with the try-outs? If you feel compelled to then make me beg to continue our friendship… No thanks. Delete me. I hope it does make you feel renewed. Seems like a cry for attention sometimes, or an attempt to dump you before you dump them. And then there is the whole question of why did you invite so many people that you feel you must periodically delete them to a manageable size. You accepted or invited – they don’t multiply on their own. /grumble grumble going home.
Well, I am really, really old, because I see no point in belonging to Facebook. If I really want to say anything to anyone, or they want to say anything to me, email or the phone, sometimes even a real letter, works just fine. Why would I need to post it on the internet instead of saying it directly in an email? I can just as easily email pictures to those who would be interested, so once again, why the need to put them on FB?
I totally get it. Honestly, I have an at best amiguous relationship with Facebook… the fact that it is where many of the people and organizations I want to hear from prefer to do their communicating isn’t one I can change by my refusal to join… but I have friended up people and organizations only to discover that they violate one of the sacred rules of social media ettiquette and just spam the daylights out of my wall. There reaches a saturation point where I just don’t want to weed through THAT many updates to find the information I want to see. I was loosing the pictures of my nieces and the half-off specials at my favorite cafe in between a zillion reposts of political drivel. So I defriended them… for me it wasn’t a social thing, but a content-control exercise.
i have to confess that, although i loathe fb, i’m on there. i first joined because that’s where friends and family members regularly posted photos &etc and i wanted to keep up with them easily (same reason i had an unused account on myspace). then, as my little nonprofit grew, i decided to use fb for that. most everything i post is related to business. i do have to say that i’m really enjoying being able to separate out my “friends” into various lists (real friends, acquaintances, work-related, etc.); keeps my wall from being too spammy and lets me get to the stuff i want to see more easily.
I have unfriended a person for saying that she would spit in my face if she saw me on the street. She apparently held (quite strongly) a different view on nationalized health care than I did. She had posted her feelings.. I chimed in with my point of view. I have no problem having relationships and discussions with people who don’t share my personal beliefs. I figure it lets me learn new things and develop an appreciation for other ideas.. even if I don’t agree with them. Once this person conveyed (so eloquently) that she was not open to discussion.. that she was the master of the pulpit.. then I had no further need for her on my “list.”
I read an article once on being happy.. and it mentioned that quite often we allow ourselves to become unhappy by subjecting ourselves to outside influences that can be avoided. One example is catalogues and magazines. We get them and then can become depressed that we can’t afford to have “all” the things we see in them. Of course, until we saw those advertisements, we didn’t even know that those things existed! I also took that thought and extended it to other situations. I can choose who I have on my list.. if those people make me unhappy, I can control my exposure to them by defriending them. Poof.. stressful interaction removed:) Of course, we can’t insulate ourselves from every unpleasantness in the world, but we can choose to eliminate some of it. (Like me refusing to listen to Glenn Beck…and I AM a conservative.. he is just too hysterical for me!).
I also had a good friend say we should only associate with people who improve us. That does not mean to not associate those who need help in becoming better people, but if those people don’t want to move themselves forward.. they are a weight dragging everyone down.
So.. unfriend away.. or at least block the regular posts of that person who wants to tell you every tiny detail of what they did all throughout the day.. just way too tedious!
Um, it feels like — a little less distraction? Like turning down the radio when they launch into the 8 minute advertisement marathon.
I think some people just take FB way too serious. I am on it, but I do not get very personal or spend a great deal of time on it. I don’t really have time to spend “unfriending” even if I wanted too.
i have friends – that are both fb friends and in real life that i disagree with politically. we can ignore that fact and still have fun. but if they want to be extremely vocal re: their politics on fb – that is their choice. (”I don’t like the tone of some of their comments and status updates.”) since i don’t want that slapping me in the face when i go to fb i have simply blocked their posts. they don’t know the difference. when i choose to see what they are up to – it’s easy enough to go look. when they talk about fun stuff i might “like” it.
I joined FB to play games, temporary unemployment. Then I moved to China and am bored. On one vacation trip FB denied me access as I was using a different location to log on. The question to regain access was to identify people by their pictures. I sent an email to FB asking if they had lost their minds, I did not really know these people, I played stupid games with them.
I am amazed at the information put out there for others to see.
I saw an ad yesterday for the eighteenth edition of Emily Post’s etiquette book. It contains a lot of discussion of social networking questions.
I’ve unfriended quite a few people at one point. When I first joined fb I accepted pretty much every friend request, as long as I knew the person. I finally decided I had too many friends and didn’t particularly care to keep tabs on people that I barely knew from HS. Now I just don’t accept friend requests from those type of people. Mostly I enjoy having less friend clutter – but sometimes I hear some good gossip from back home and wish I could go snoop on someone’s wall!
I have a brother in law who righteously unfriended me because I jokingly called him a douchebag (I call my kids DBs sometimes too. And I really like them) and because he “doesn’t have any interest” in what I have to say on my statuses. He did the same to my husband. I was weirdly offended at first and then I thought how funny it was because, really, are we truly “friends?”
this is a bit late but, the best thing I actually found was to completely delete my facebook account, and yes for the first week I actually suffered withdrawal symptoms. Then I had an epipheny, the people who actually were important to me I stayed in contact with in more meaningful ways, actual phone calls, visits, and personal emails, and the ones who were annoying the crap out of me, the fake friends, were long gone and off my mind. Leaving me much HAPPIER! Truly.