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Friday, May 20, 2011
How to Lose Friends and Not Alienate People
I have been puzzling over the best way to defriend on Facebook lately. I think the following pattern is probably pretty common: 1) join and enjoy Facebook; 2) get excited about all the folks you can friend ("Hey, Richard Posner is on Facebook!"); 3) realize that given your influential friends, you can no longer post in the carefree way you once did ("Hey, I can't post that joke about prostate vs. prostrate -- Richard Posner might see it!") and that 4) some of your non-influential "friends" are not really friends and have grown tiresome ("Damn, I am sick of getting those prostate-vs-.-prostrate jokes from X.")
At that point, one's options are limited. One can cull friends, starting with the most obvious suspects and proceeding from there; but one risks offending some of those people when the defriending is discovered. (I am assuming that the primary actor here is an over-sensitive, risk-averse, craven individual. No resemblance to myself is intended.) One can eliminate everyone with a flimsy excuse ("I need a break from Facebook"), and then selectively refriend; but this is usually discovered too. One can create two Facebook accounts, one for personal and one for professional friends. But the Senate Judiciary Committee will probably eventually look at both anyway, and even under this approach too many non-friend "friends" will still end up clogging your life.
Perhaps I've been spending too much time rereading Cryptonomicon lately, but I think what is needed is some kind of random-number-generator Facebook app. Call it, say, The Lottery, after Shirley Jackson's story. It will simply randomly generate a number of friends and automatically delete them every so often. Perhaps a nice impersonal notification can be sent out. ("You have been defriended by Paul Horwitz's Lottery App. This was a the result of a random number generator and is in no way personal.") That way, you can cut down on unneeded friends and return to the heedless and irresponsible posts and baby pictures you used to put up when you only had a couple of hundred friends; and, like customer service reps everywhere, you can simply blame it on the computer.
The only fly in the ointment, I suppose, is that if you have chosen to use The Lottery, you can be held responsible for the unfriendliness of doing so in the first place. Perhaps, as in Jackson's actual lottery story, we should simply make this an automatic feature of Facebook for every member, without an opt-out possibility.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on May 20, 2011 at 12:11 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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Comments
Maybe this just proves what an idiot I am, but I really don't care whether my "professional" FB friends see my less-than-professional FB posts. Actually, what I find more bothersome is the inverse -- professional friends on FB always posting about how clever and awesome they are.
Posted by: Eric Muller | May 20, 2011 1:23:40 PM
The friend list tools in Facebook have gotten much better since the early days. You can now create "friend lists" within a single facebook account and have posts only go to specific lists. That combined with the ability to ignore activity from a given user allows you to unfriend people as a practical matter without actually alerting them to that fact.
https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768
Posted by: Brad | May 20, 2011 12:28:06 PM
Throw off your shackles, Paul! http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/10/goodbye-facebook-and-hello-prawfs.html
Also, this: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s14e04-you-have-0-friends
Posted by: Marc DeGirolami | May 20, 2011 12:25:18 PM
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