So for Lent I’m giving up something that I cannot easily un-give up once Lent is over. I’ve decided its time to cull my FB list. Yes I know that I swore I would never be one those people who unfriends someone just because they don’t remember who that person is, or haven’t talked to them in a while. But then the Great John Scalzi pointed out that:
“Just because Facebook calls its connection mechanism ‘friending’ doesn’t mean that everyone you connect with there are actual friends; they’re merely people who, for one reason or another, you’ve decided to connect with on a social media network.”
I thought I’d cull 10% which would be 87.1 friends at this point. [Or I could do 100 since I’m jonsing about The 100 lately.]
Like many people, my FB friends fall into four buckets which sometimes overlap.
- Real friends and family that I care about;
- People who entertain, enlighten or inform me;
- People I’m loyal to;
- People I know.
As Scalzi correctly points out, only one of these groups are proper friends. So the people who are safe are family of course and friends that I actually interact with. High School friends are immune because of that loyalty thing. Running friends too. And of course all ChicagoNow bloggers. Update: I changed my mind on this one. IF anyone should understand the need for a FB Blog Page like to increase its internet presences, it should be your fellow bloggers.
I’m going to start with people who haven’t even logged on in years because they won’t care.
Next will be Dead Profiles. When a friend deactivates their Facebook account, they are still in your friends list. I keep some of these around for reasons, but otherwise this should eliminate a few people.
Next will be the dbags who ask me to like their pet causes but do not like my FB Blog Page because I’m petty that way. Considering my page tells me that 287 friends like it, that means I have almost 600 friends who are actively not supporting me. Withholding the kind of help that can be done from the comfort of ones couch without any more effort than it takes to share a cat video.
Finally there are the people who are only friends with me because I was of use to them sometime in the past and they are keeping me around in case that crops up again.
How about you? Have you un-friended someone for what might be considered a trivial reason? Tell us in the comments.
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