Have you ever been ‘un-friended’ on facebook? I don’t mean by someone you’ve never met before, but by someone you know and you thought was your friend?
If you have, how did you feel? A little strange maybe..or confused?
I was ‘removed’ from a friend list. Not by a great friend or anything, but by someone my OH knew from way back and then had met up with again.
This guy came and ate dinner with us, stayed over-night and then came to OH’s 40th. He ate our food, drank our wine and flirted with all of my single friends! Next day he’d made us all his friends on facebook!
Great stuff! We exchanged messages, had some banter and looked at each other’s photos. As the months went on a few of my friends told me they had been culled from his list on Facebook. Oh! I checked and I was still there! Maybe it’s because he felt he didn’t know them very well…..but it was only a matter of time before both me and OH disappeared too! And then you start to get a bit paranoid.
Since that time I have begun to notice how when my friends change their status from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘Single’ it becomes big news. One friends husband hacked into her profile and changed her status!! The comments she got were unbelievable! People were ‘devastated’ and were going around with bottles of wine to console her…but it was all a big joke!
A few weeks ago, one of my best friends split up from her boyfriend. “I couldn’t believe it”, she said, “I broke up with him and by the time I got home he’d already changed his status to single”.
I think that upset her more than the relationship ending.
So you know what I did? I took him off my Facebook friends list! That’ll show him!
But here’s the most disturbing thing yet. OH was updating his Facebook yesterday evening when he exlaimed, “Oh my God!”. He does that alot, so I did what I do alot. I ignored him!
“I can’t believe it!” He continued. “One of my old work colleagues has died…it’s here…on Facebook.”
And there it was, the death had been announced on Facebook. OK….that’s not so weird, after all that’s a good way of letting people know.
Here was the strange thing. Even though he had sadly passed away, people were still leaving messages for him. Stuff like “It was a great send off mate, you would have loved it” and “Sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral”, and finally “Lovin’ the profile pic!!! Love all the pics with you in!!!!”
I know that people want to pay their last respects, but I just find it a little weird. Another friend of my OH’s was killed in a helicopter crash last year, and we’ve heard that her family closed her Facebook page because they couldn’t cope with the messages that were still being left for her.
Is it a good thing though? A way to keep someone’s memory alive maybe? I’m not so sure, what do you think?
A year or so ago, someone I worked with told me in passing that he occasionally tidied up his Facebook friends “because I’ve got people on there I’m never going to talk to again”. A few months back, I was thinking it was odd that I hadn’t seen a status update from X in a while, so I checked and, yep, he’d gone. I’d been ‘unfriended’. Now I can’t say this guy and I were exactly great mates, and he’s right, we probably would never have spoken again. But I still felt really insulted!
Social media is so new that people read many different things into the actions others take. One person’s sensible way of communicating (e.g. death, divorce) could be wildly inappropriate to another. I think we need to tread carefully to avoid upsetting one another as we find our feet with this new way of communicating.
And yes, I think using Facebook as an informal book of condolence is weird. Even though I used it to announce (to extended family, friends and work colleagues) that we’d got married the previous week!
Congratulations on your marriage Helen!
Maybe for the younger generation (Oh I sound so old!) Facebook will take the place of sympathy cards and they won’t see anything weird in it at all?!