Are You Defriending Today?

Too many friends on Facebook is unfriendly

I just realized that I used to have a lot of friends that I don’t have contact with any more. When I rearranging my shoe boxes of old pictures and trying to digitize them, I found my middle school friends whom I don’t even know where are they now.

My friend circle has changed a lot of times since my elementary school. Every time when I finished a school and went to another one, my friends changed. After I finished all my schools, every time I moved to a new place, I changed my friends. It looked to me that there were no permanent friends at all and all friends are related to schools, works, churches or locations. Now as I am getting older, I feel that I would be very lucky if I could have 5 permanent friends who will be my friends no matter where I go, regardless of what I do and no matter who I am.

My son is in high school and his Facebook friends are much more than his school classmates. He used to have about two thousands friends on Facebook. I asked him what was his goal for the number of friends, he said fifty thousands. I said if he knew all those friends. He said no. Then I seriously asked him to do a defriending just like I do a virus scan to clean up my computer’s hard drives every other week. Virus scan will clean up your registry, temporary folders and make your computer run faster and more efficient. Similarly a social network defriending will make your social network more useful and efficient.

My phone service has a data cap and I have a habit to update my Facebook status while I am on the metro rail. But every time when I open it, I got lots of very annoying Facebook posts from my friend list. Here are some of the examples:

“My coffee foam turns a little grayish this morning. Could it be the weather or the temperature?”

“My dog ran into three other dogs when we walk. I was wondering were they girls or boys?”

“Name any food without an E in it. Or name any state without an A.”

“Comment ME TOO if you like the picture.”

“????……. well, just don’t know what to do.”

The bad news was, these useless posts often came with a high resolution photo or even a 15 seconds HD video. I had to flip through all these annoying posts before I could find some of the important updates I was looking for.

I thought of the defriending but I ran into a dilemma before I could do that. These people are my friends and they didn't do anything bad to me. They are nice people and every time when I see them in gym, church or work, I say hello and they smile back to me. If I defriend them, are they going to feel being hurt? It is even harder for me to make a decision because these people, other than post their dogs or coffee foams, post some useful things too, at least sometimes. So should I just defriend them or let their posts eat my cell phone bandwidth when I really want to use the social networks.

Once my car was sabotaged in a gym parking lot. Someone poked a hole on each of my two front tires, just for fun I guess. I posted this unfortunate incident to my Facebook page to alert my friends to keep an eye on their cars and also ask for help. I got 25 likes and couple of comments on my post, but finally it was my real friend, who was not on my Facebook friends list,(she doesn't have an account at all) picked me up, sent me home, and gave me recommendations for some good tire shops.

Your might have a lot of friends like colleagues from your work, neighbors from where you live, workout buddies from your gym. But these friends will change if you move, change jobs or switch a gym. Your real friends are the ones who are always available to help, no matter where you are and what you do. I real want these kind of friends, four or five of them are good enough, and they don’t have to be on my Facebook friend list. I also want to be this kind of friend to others.

If you are not Anderson Cooper or Lady Gaga, you don’t need couple of thousand friends. If you only have 100 or less friends whom you real know what they look like, that’s good enough. If you do have more than that, do a defriending, it will make your Facebook experience much effective and more enjoyable.