Having recently moved over 700 miles from my home town and using Facebook since its early years in the mid 2000s, I decided it was time to do some housekeeping with my "friends" list. A little background to this post first though. For my Facebook friends reading this, you may have noticed that I shared a picture from the "Fight Club" page with a picture of Ed Norton's character and the text "we buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't care about." Now were rolling...
As much as you might like to think that you can keep in touch with everyone who touches your life, the sheer mathematics of the situation and the limitations of the human brain make that a rather fanciful delusion. We inevitably loose touch or interest with some people as our lives carry on. That is a fact. Also, one can accumulate quite a few "randomly added friends" over the years and while a few here and there seem harmless, they can really add up to some major pollution in your "news feed." Have you ever noticed that when you log on to Facebook you have to scroll through two or three pages of crap just to find something you are remotely interested in? There's your sign.
I'm not nagging the intent of social networks, rather, I think that they are exceptional tools if used for their intended purpose. That is, to keep in touch with people over long distances and to have fun with; as the saying goes "I'm cooler online." But this habit soon preoccupies the intent of the social media and as a result we end up "friending" everyone we meet rather than those we want to keep in touch with. The real root of this post is some psychological research I read a while back that has been done on technology actually complicating our lives rather than making it easier. This is of course in tandem with the capitalist drive of "buy more, do more, make more per hour." Technology is often assumed as "enriching" our lives when in reality it could be adding a great deal of distress to yours. Take for example the fact that 20 years ago nobody was fussing about the new Facebook layout, or their lost text messages, or the fact that they can't sync their phone, PC, TV, game console, and home theater all together.
Many people post a status update when they conduct a "friend purge" but I find this tacky and a bit rude, of course those who would be potentially offended can't see the post; but it is a matter of principle. The criteria one uses for such a purge is entirely up to them, but a good starting point may be looking at your friend list and asking yourself the following questions:
1) Have I talked to this person in the past year? Do I have a picture with them in the last 3-5 years?
2) Will this person notice that I have unfriended them? Do I have to ask, 'who is that?'
3) Would this person meet me for coffee or a drink just to chat or hang out?
4) Do I talk to this person in real life or only online?
5) Do I care what goes on in this person's life?
There is no need to be overly hasty unless you have an absurd number of friends in the thousands or something like that. Assuming that you only notice an abundance of pollution and crap-posts in your friend list once every (in my case) 6 years or so, the hour it might take to clean the list up isn't terribly time consuming. This all also depends on the purpose of your social media, something that should be mentioned. If it is a personal profile, perhaps you should be more reserved when it comes to adding friends. On the other hand, if you're a business trying to spread a little free press it might not be a bad idea to go friend crazy; but marketing isn't my specialty.
Something else to consider is how many social media accounts you really need? What is the sense in having a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Google +, Aim, and Yahoo? Talk about adding clutter to your inboxes! As mentioned above, the role of your social media may vary as to how many of these networks are applicable or necessary. I don't think a Facebook for you personal use and Google + for your professional / business use is out of hand. But if you're constantly on your phone plugging IMs and text messages between browsing Facebook pictures and Tweets all while waiting for your celebrity sleaze video blog to load, then that is entirely different.
In my specific case I started with a friend count in the mid 600s and reduced that to just under 400 and that was being generous in most cases. Unfortunately the Facebook interface at the time of this post doesn't allow bulk unfriending so the each had to be done individually. With a modern we browser allowing multiple tabs, this took me maybe an hour or so; for sure less than two. The result? When I logged on to Facebook the next day, the first post I read was one of my close friends. How bout that? There were a couple junk posts, but I didn't have to scroll more than a few clicks before finding a mix of good friends and things that I "care about" but just wasn't interested in at the moment. As I speculated from the beginning it was really quite enriching to clean out the clutter from my "friend" list and rejuvenating to remember what social networking was designed for rather than be bombarded by a bloat-fed new reel at every log in.
Hope you all got something useful from this post, or at least found it entertaining. If you unfriend me, either I won't notice, or you'll be getting a re-request or phone call as soon as I do haha. Cheers!
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