I've been de-friended!
Today I was flipping through facebook and decided to check up on a "friend" of mine that I hadn't thought about in a while. We were friends at one point on Facebook, I distinctly remember a few messages sent between us when one of us added the other (I forget who added who). Much to my surprise, we were no longer digital friends.
The whole idea of someone being a friend on facebook is a fluid situation. Some of my "friends" are people I haven't seen in twenty years. Some of them are people who remembered me but I only have a vague recollection of them, or in some cases don't remember them at all. At this point, if someone wants to be my friend, I see no reason not to be theirs (with a very few exceptions). I'm friends with people I've met only once and may very well never see again.
There's been times that I've thought "you know, I don't really have any contact with this person, other than seeing their status updates....do I really need to be friends with them?" The answer I keep coming back to is "yes." What if sometime I'm snowed in at an airport where I don't know anyone except for a facebook friend that lives in the area? While I'd never directly call someone and ask them to do me a favor as big as that, if I posted a status update saying "snowed in at the Denver airport," perhaps one of my FB friends would see it and give me a call asking if I needed a place to crash. There's no downside to being connected.
So now I'm wondering why I was de-friended. I'm trying not to take it personally, but it does bruise the ego just a little bit. I like to consider myself a nice, friendly guy (as we all do), so when someone says "I no longer want to have contact with you" it stings the ego a little bit, no matter how infrequent or impersonal that contact has been. Was it something I did? Was it something I didn't do? Should I have commented on something I didn't? Did I not send a birthday message? Or did I comment on something on a mutal friend's page that upset someone else? I don't know. Or did this person simply change their mind and say "I shouldn't have added him as a friend in the first place." I should make it clear that I'm not mad or upset that I was defriended...it's your life and your page to do with it what you want....I'm just more curious as to the decision making process that led to my deletion. I think I've only defriended one person ever, and that person was dishonest in her relationship with a friend of mine. I think I've only denied or ignored one friend request as well.
Perhaps it simply comes down to FB friend philosophy. I tend to want to be friends with the people I have the least contact with....the people that I may otherwise never be able to contact if the need or desire to do so arose. Being friends with my wife, or brother, or coworkers....it's nice to acknowledge the relationship, but I don't really gain anything from these updates that I don't get at home, or on the phone. Now, if a person I went to elementary school with takes a trip to australia and posts some pictures.....that's something I wouldn't ever get to see if I wasn't friends with them...I'd completely miss out on seeing some amazing pictures. Or say circumstances lead me to move to a new city, and the only person I know there is someone I had a biology class with freshman year of high school that just so happens to be a realtor. I might just send that person an email asking if they could help me out. I've even used facebook to get a dental referral...see what I'm saying?
So I'm here to say that if you're my friend on facebook now, you'll be my friend on facebook until the site starts charging a fee, goes offline, or I decide that I'm too old to do this stuff anymore and delete my account. Until then.....you've got a friend in me.
No comments:
Post a Comment