An Overabundance of Friends

It feels shameful to admit that 90% of the time I spend on Facebook is not time that actually builds my relationships with people. I check out links people have posted; I make short, superficial comments on various posts; I try to come up with my own clever quip to put in my status box. The truth is, virtually everyone in the world I really care about rarely uses FB at all. So what am I actually spending all this time doing while reading the random ramblings of near-strangers? My one rationalization is that everyone I know on FB is someone I actually have met face-to-face and that I know how our acquaintance began. That said, the majority of people on my newsfeed haven't spoken to or seen me in over four years and I just skip right past their updates on my way to the 2 or 3 that are from people I want to hear from.

This all sounds terribly cruel. But I'm definitely not the first person to point out that FB helps us maintain "relationships" that would otherwise have just atrophied. I do value the fact that it has connected or reconnected me to people who are very physically distant (like my Australian cousins). But the real point that it's not making me any closer to most of the friends and family that I actually want to be close to. Those people I still have to send emails to, which I would do more of it I wasn't on Facebook waiting to hear from them.

So yesterday I made a special new sub-list of friends on Facebook that includes only people I'm interested in staying in contact with. This sounds borderline fascist, but it's another step towards cutting off my FB connection entirely. I've also started going through and "hiding" people who aren't on this list from my newsfeed. My web of connections will start to look a lot more like it did when I joined FB back in 2004, when I had 58 friends who all went to Berkeley. Gradually, I will start de-friending people until I'm down to just my special list. The only thing that scares me: those people I have de-friended will start getting "suggestions" from Facebook that they might know me, and then they'll know what I did! I'm gonna grin and swallow the embarrassment, though, because I really want out.