Let’s not be Facebook friends

It’s been a while – quite a few months actually – since my last post. I didn’t know what to say, until today.

What is a Facebook friend?

I mean, seriously? It’s almost like the more friends you have, the more power or status accredited to you. You may disagree with this, but subconsciously, it plagues everyone’s mind. Even mine.

Today, I realised I had been deleted as a ” friend”  on Facebook. This person was not a close friend, in fact, I don’t think I had ever spoken to them in person except very briefly when I passed them at Melbourne Central station once – I knew I went to high school with them and thus I only felt obliged to acknowledge them with a “hi” of some sort. Nevertheless, I was connected to them via the social networking site that is Facebook.

I’ll admit that most of my “Facebook friends”  are people I am acquainted with. Less than half of them I would actually classify my real-life ‘ friend’ and I am certain this applies to most of those who have Facebook accounts. Because, in essence, the purpose of Facebook is to connect people via the internet and thus aid communication. Over the few years that I’ve actually had an account, I’ve found it useful to contact people in times of desperate need when I’ve had no other method of contacting them – since they weren’t close enough to me for me to have their number saved in my phone. I’ve also found it a good way to check up on all my old high school friends just to see what is up with their lives – in a totally non-stalkerish way! It’s quick and easy – I can do this while sitting on the couch with my laptop on the coffee table without even having to speak to them at all. Everyone gets a little curious right? And I mean come on, you can’t help but look when your news feed is absolutely covered in photos from their recent trip to Greece!!

Anyways, back to my story – so I found out I was deleted by an acquaintance from high school. This person also goes to my uni, so it’s not like we’re never going to see each other again; in fact I’ve passed them a number of times at uni except now it’s like new laws apply where former co-high schoolers who ‘kinda-never-really-talked-but-still-had-each-other-as-friends-on-Facebook’  aren’t allowed to acknowledge each other because it’ll be awkward. I agree, it probably would have been awkward if we did acknowledge each other, but isn’t it made more awkward when we don’t acknowledge each other, even though we kinda know each other and we know we are not acknowledging each other because we think it’ll be awkward? If that makes any sense at all. What was most surprising to me was how I felt after I found out I was deleted. I guess it doesn’t effect me too much because it’s not like I ever talked to them anyway, but now I am not at the liberty of checking out their profile and pics whenever I want to. Perhaps that is why I was deleted? Or perhaps it was because they figured before I did that being ‘friends’ was really pointless as we didn’t need to nor did we want to be real-life friends? That our Facebook ‘friendship’  was taking up some sort of cosmic-internet-world-space that could be better used for real-life friends who wanted to the Facebook friends? Eh.. I have no idea. But still, I was kinda offended. I haven’t deleted many people before in my social-networking career purely because I know the effort one must go to in order to complete said task. So in order to delete me, they must have taken precious time out of their lives and gone to all that effort. And frankly, I’m upset that they didn’t want to be my ‘friend’  that much!

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