Like the Skeletons of Soap Bubbles

On the path to paring down my presence on Facebook, I have mentioned that I want to eventually de-friend most of the people I'm connected to. While this sounds mean, it's worth remembering that I have literally no contact with the vast majority of people I'm "friends" with. A few years ago, when my love of the site was at its highest, it was thrilling to get friend requests from people I had not seen nor heard from in several years. When I was still in college, it was fun to be friends with people whom I might see around campus. Since those times, the purpose of Facebook has drastically changed. It used to simply be a place to declare your presence, make a statement, say, "Here I am!" These days, people gather around their news feeds like a water cooler at work. The problem is that I hardly know any of the people standing there with me. I've trimmed the content of my news feed down to a few dozen people, a list I call the "keepers." Of this list, only about 20 are on the site on a regular basis anyway, but those few are pretty active. But every other tenuous connection I have on Facebook represents nothing in the real world. The rest have to go.

To aid in my quest to tidy up my friends list, I was given some advice by my friend Thai, from UCSB, who directed me to his blog post on the same topic. He makes some excellent observations on the persistence of online connections even when the same relationships in the real world have evaporated like a soap bubbles (Have you ever seen the skeleton of a soap bubble? It's pretty cool.) until they're gone. They haven't popped, they have just ceased to exist. Along with his thoughts, my friend also provided a list of objective criteria for evaluating a "friend." This is just what I needed!

Here's Thai's list:

1) Will this person be at my wedding? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

2) Would this person pick me up from the airport? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

3) If I was visiting the city this person lived in, would I be comfortable meeting up with person for coffee & catch-up? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

4) If this person wrote on my wall, would I think, “WTF?” If yes, then delete. This is not a “friend.”

I've begun by creating a group in FB called "Not Even Coffee." Cold? Perhaps. But, let's be honest, if I wouldn't have coffee with a person, they won't miss me. And I'm okay with that.

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.