Flimsy Facebook friends

Deleting people is a growing form of therapy. Perhaps happily, this is not the latest jargon for serial-killing, but is a synonym for a re-appraisal of ‘Facebook friends’. Facebook friends – those people you like or love, but also those people who have got married and not told you, even after the event. If those two categories are indistinguishable to you… oh dear.

The fact that we use the word ‘Facebook’ as an adjective for something like friendship instantly devalues it. Think of all those films in which friendship is a strong theme: The Dam Busters, Peter’s Friends, Bridge over the River Kwai. Quite apart from them being from the wrong age, the idea that the characters could be described as something so flimsy as ‘Facebook friends’ seems an almost perverse comparison.

That is not to say I do not use, or dislike Facebook – it is good fun. Though I must admit unless you are careful (or paranoid) about your settings, it is a way for everyone you have ever met to find you.

Problem 1 with the system is the point at which one ‘adds’ a friend. How many times have you added someone via your phone after a bottle of wine and have never really met or spoken to them since? This is also serious factor in problem 2: at what point do you remove someone? In real life both of these seem far easier: if you want to talk to someone and spend time with someone, you do. If you do not, you do not. Not deleting someone because you might want to talk to them or know them has some credence, but no more than keeping something expensive with no immediate use for but you do not want to have to replace. Having said that, removing someone and even blocking them can be a punishment: deletion is referred to by many as the ultimate smack-down. Fair enough, but if someone deleted me and I found myself unable to recall who they were, smack-down it would not be. However, deleting someone you see regularly is dangerous. I was once deleted by a (now ex-) colleague who had not bothered to check who she was deleting. The awkwardness on her part was delicious, though no apology was forthcoming. I have not re-added her, nor have I accepted a friend request from her since, needless to say.

I suppose one could restrict Facebook friendships only to those one is in regular contact with. But what would be the point of that? I know people who use Facebook only for the opposite reason – for people they never see frequently because they are overseas. Seems sensible, though if you are in different time zones and doing different things, communication for anything more than correspondence chess seems as unlikely as it is unworkable.

For myself, I use it for a mixture of these two reasons, and much else in between, as do most of my Facebook ‘friends’. In practice this is rather like having my current friends, school friends, ex-girlfriends, drinking pals, and my mother in the same room, with social etiquette preventing anyone from introducing themselves to anyone else. Just putting that list together has made me more concerned. The sum total is that I cannot say what I think as there is always a ‘friend’ I would rather not hear about it, but I can get in touch with virtually anyone of my acquaintances. Well, unless I have deleted them for not knowing what not to say at parties, that is.