The Great Facebook Friend Cull

Awkward social situations are as old as time (Adam, Eve, apple; eek we're naked etc) but there is a peculiar modern twist that has only come about because of Facebook.

It's when you bump into someone who happens to be a 'friend' on Facebook and they ask how you are and what you have been up to and you  mention the two kids you have had, and they respond something along the lines of ''wow, really?''   And it sort of hangs in the air between the two of you that they kind of knew this as they had seen a few million photos on facebook and a few pertinent status updates, but that they had not bothered to type a five second congrats as they were too busy playing Farmville and composing status updates about how big their lemon muffin was at morning tea.

It is three years since I joined Facebook.

The first photo of me ever posted on Facebook, June 2007.
We are in our Glebe apartment and giving off very smug married vibes!

I love it and live on it.   When I joined, we were living in Australia, with no family and it was so great for keeping in touch with people in NZ and overseas.   Now we are back home, and I have three brothers in three foreign countries, again it is perfect.   For me Facebook is not a work tool, or a networking tool, but a way to write funny quips about my brother's skiing tights, when he posts a photo in London that he took in Switzerland.  And have the joke co-signed by another brother in Canada. 

One good thing about it is you don't clog up people's email inboxes with photos.  They can just log on and see what you're up to if they want to.  Having said that,  I am sure a number of my 143 friends have blocked me from their newsfeed as they are sick of seeing photos of my kids in their pajamas every time they log on.   

So why have I amassed 143 people as 'friends' and now decide I don't want them? 

Lots of the people who are my facebook friends are also people who are my FRIENDS, or family.   Some though, are acquaintences through long ago workplaces, or through other friends, or old school class mates.  None could be described as 'randoms' with whom I have barely ever exchanged a word.   But even so, I don't know what quite a few of them are doing in my virtual circle of friends.

I don't care about what is happening in some people's lives, and I don't care if they don't care about mine.  So why are we ''friends?''   If you don't care about someone enough to congratulate them for getting married, having a baby, getting a new job or something else that is momentous and important, then why be Facebook friends.

Life is busy - we often don't have time for those near and dear to us.   So it can feel a bit of an imposition to log on and find photo albums from an old workmate of their holiday, or cat, or new girlfriend.   Do we look, do we comment, do we 'like?  Do they want us to or expect us to?

Are there people out there offended by my lack of action on their status updates, or photos, or my failure to join their cause or group?  

You don't need to be on Facebook to get in touch with someone - you can message your old classmate if you really want to, without befriending them.  But why would you want to get in touch?  Would you have tracked them down by other methods - phone book, electoral roll, if they had not shown up in the ''People You May Know'' column?    No, probably not.  Kind of stalkerish if you did.

Some people are better left in the past.   Not because they're bad people or equate to bad memories but because there are times in your life to be discerning, and there are times when there is too much water under the bridge, or when you never really knew them that well to begin with.

A friend and I have chatted about facebook and its strange etiquette, or lack thereof.  Like how some people befriend you, then never follow up with a message, and even more strangely, ignore one that you might send.   Like how some people, close friends or family (or people you thought were, anyway) who might once have bothered to send you a personal email or ring you up, now just post things on your wall, as if that is a perfect substitute.    Like how people just completely ignore a major event in your life, like the aforementioned births, but then comment on a status update you have made about the weather. 

Three years ago before I was cynical about Facebook, I accepted a lot of friend requests, and made some myself, that I wouldn't do now.    Privacy settings aside (and I do use them) am I the only one resentful that lots of people can ''see all my stuff''?

If I wouldn't invite someone to my house to sift through my photo albums, why do I effectively email them out to their newsfeeds several times a week?

Of course there are people with Facebook accounts who haven't logged in since 1998.   And other people who have 902 friends so your baby news just gets lost in a newsfeed which moves as fast as Usain Bolt.    

So if I drop quietly out of their list of facebook friends, who is to know, or care...!   Until we bump into each other on the street and say ''what have you been up to?''   And neither of us will know.  Or be expected to, perhaps.  There's something kinda cool about that.

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Oh, I have just done a google search of ''facebook cull'' and there are websites devoted to it.  Of course.   One guy has a website naming all the people he is culling, how he knows them and why he is culling them.  http://www.facebookcull.com/

And this blog post, written by someone who had amassed more than 600 friends and describes their cull of 200 as like cleaning out the fridge, is worth a read.

Source: http://joetotheworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/great-facebook-friend-cull.html