Unfriended
The unceremonious end to a digital friendship
It’s not that I’ve never unfriended anyone. I have. I regularly clean up my collection of friends on Facebook. Every few months or so, like spring cleaning, I pare down the list removing those I barely know, those I don’t interact with, and those who clearly are MIA - their account abandoned gathering dust.
But to date I have not “unfriended” anyone I know in real life whether in protest of their lack of taste or for and objectionable comment. The act of severing the digital tie to a real friend seems rather too personal for such an impersonal media.
Real friendships should be ended face to face when every option for nuanced communication has been exhausted.
Recently I discovered, however, that someone I considered a real-world friend had in fact sliced me from their digital life. They had been rather quiet after an online disagreement so one day I popped by their page to see what was up.
Greeting me was the green “Add Friend” button.
So that was that.
What is odd, however, is how I felt about this:
Nothing.
It is not at all like losing a friend. It’s more like losing a source of amusement, a pleasant distraction. The interaction with friends on Facebook can be entertaining, interesting, provocative, enlightening… but it is not genuinely heartfelt. People are not there to give you support - just likes. It’s not a place you can share your entire self: just the photoshopped personality which is sunny, smart, witty, clever. Losing a participant in the entourage of this pseudo-self is not at all the same as actually losing a real friend.
It is a strange kind of reality, this social circle of pseudo-selves. It has edged out a lot of real world interaction and we accept it as a suitable replacement for face-to-face socialisation. But it is something quite different.
And what of the real world friend who severed this digital relationship? I’m apt to interpret the depth of our relationship through what had become of our online interaction - as FB had become the place we met the most.
Which means I guess we weren’t that close after all.
