On the conflicted nature of unfriending people

 


In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary proclaimed unfriend as its Word of the Year. It's a rather brutal notion that one can simply delete a friend by clicking on a button. Yet it also brings into question our concept of what it actually means to have a friend in an age of technology.

Before social media, when all our friends were people we actually knew, one might fall out with a friend or simply drift apart due to geographic distance or different life paths. "Oh, yes," you might say of a certain former friend, "we were friends once but we had a falling out over what constitutes an appropriate pizza topping and as far as I'm concerned, he and his disgusting pineapple pizza deserve each other." Or, "Yes, I was quite good friends with her, but after she joined that religious cult and moved, we just stopped seeing each other. I wonder how she's going now?"

There are other friends with whom we remain close for our entire lives regardless of distance or live paths. These people are treasures and must never be taken for granted.

Social media friendships, on the other hand, are minefields. Who does one accept as a "friend", how much of one's life does one want to reveal to the myriad of people on a "friends" list and are there ethical considerations in deleting them?

And what about social media friends who die? How soon is it appropriate to "unfriend" them? Should one unfriend a deceased friend at all? I mean, it's not like they've done anything to offend and deleting them seems somehow callous. Their social media profile may also be all you have left to remember them.

An extensive 2011 study* found that persons mainly unfriend people because they posted unimportant and inappropriate topics and because they posted too much. For 50.1% of the respondents to the study, too many posts are the triggering incident to unfriend someone. Conversely, too little posting activity hardly ever (3.8%) provokes unfriending. Also too many game requests (34.2%), unimportant posts (32.3%), inappropriate posts (25.7%) and racist posts (18.3%) are reasons for unfriending. Politics (15.2%), sexist posts (11.7%) or religion (10.0%) play minor roles as reasons for unfriending.

Since that study was undertaken, Facebook has added a "snooze" option. Rather than unfriending someone because they're posting too much, oversharing or sharing views you don't like, you can opt not to receive their posts for 30 days. It seems a lot less final than deleting them altogether. It's saying, "look, I still want to be your friend, but can you just shut the fuck up for a while?"

I unfriended someone this morning. A person I know and actually quite like, but I just don't want to see right wing political propaganda on my social media timeline. This, of course, points to another phenomenon: the extent to which we create like-minded communities among our social media contacts. It's a fraught business, this unfriending. By unfriending those with whom we disagree on any issue, are we propagating echo chambers? Where does it all end? And what happens when you, yourself, are finally unfriended ...


John Snow GIFfrom John Snow GIFs


 

*Sibona, C., & Walczak, S. (2011). "Unfriending on Facebook: Friend request and online/offline behavior
analysis". In Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (10 pp.).
Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.

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