Tag Archives: Friends

Whither the Facebook Purge?

Posted on by
1

The other day, a bout of online drama made me won­der if it wouldn’t be a good idea to make my online activ­i­ties a lit­tle more pri­vate — hide my Twit­ter feed, for exam­ple, and maybe un-friend some peo­ple on Face­book to restrict it to just my “core” friends.

Facebook Friends List

Do I actu­ally want to know what 281 peo­ple are doing?

But in doing so, I thought for prob­a­bly the first time about the direc­tion Face­book has taken with regards to friend­ships and view­ing friends’ updates.

Firstly, unlike Twit­ter, when some­one you know “friends” you on Face­book, the socially accept­able thing to do is to accept.  Rather than say­ing “it’s great that you’re inter­ested in me, but I’m not as inter­ested in you, so I won’t ‘fol­low’ you back,” Face­book man­dates a two-way inter­est.  So if some­one “friends” you, you either have to ignore them (and feel slightly guilty about it) or com­mit your­self to see­ing their updates.

Sec­ondly, Face­book is becom­ing less of a place to catch up with friends, and more of an iden­tity ser­vice (which has been accel­er­ated with the new Time­line pro­files).  Your Face­book pro­file defines you; tells oth­ers who you are and who you know.  This adds to the impe­tus to “friend” peo­ple you don’t really care about that much — you’re not so much express­ing an inter­est in another per­son as defin­ing who you are.  And that, of course, also lum­bers you with look­ing at their updates all the time.

It’s obvi­ous that this is a com­mon issue, and rather than backpedal or restrict the way Face­book wants to take its ser­vice, their response has been to add com­plex fil­ter­ing options that let you block spe­cific users and apps, view only updates from var­i­ous groups, and recently, adding an auto­mated fil­ter that tries to guess which updates you’ll want to see.

Per­son­ally, I pre­fer using Face­book via the API (using Suc­cess­Whale) which avoids the auto­mated fil­ter, but I must still block the updates of peo­ple I don’t care much about man­u­ally.  I’d quite like to cull my Face­book friends list down to just those whose updates I actu­ally care about.  But is doing so a rea­son­able way of reduc­ing my infor­ma­tion over­load — or will­ingly dam­ag­ing an iden­tity that I spent the last four years try­ing to curate?

Adrift in Time

Posted on by
Reply

As Mark pointed out to me, it’s prob­a­bly rather strange to pick for your Best Man some­one who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left uni­ver­sity, it’s eas­ily over­ruled by the rest.

I mean, grad­u­a­tion was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but see­ing some­one once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t reg­is­ter in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spo­ken to those Uni­ver­sity friends less and less as time has gone on. The major­ity I don’t even reg­u­larly IM any­more — we’ve become Twit­ter friends, Face­book friends, peo­ple who com­ment on each oth­ers’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talk­ing to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for con­tact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Nor­mally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but some­times it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But hav­ing iso­lated the cause of that as my own reluc­tance to start instant mes­sen­ger chats, at least I have some­thing I can work on.

Keeping in Touch

Posted on by
Reply

I guess it’s funny who you do and who you don’t stay in touch with. After all this time I’m still par­ty­ing with peo­ple whose time at Uni didn’t even inter­sect with mine, but yet I see my best friends maybe once a year at most. And of the three peo­ple I spent my time at Uni devel­op­ing crushes on? I haven’t spo­ken to two of them since 2006.

Momentary Reminiscence

Posted on by
3

Four years ago, what dom­i­nated my mind most was that I was run­ning out of time. The end of my time at Uni­ver­sity loomed large in front of me. I didn’t have a job to go to, my final year project was dead in the water and my rela­tion­ship was painfully long-distance, but those weren’t the most weighty issues. I was trou­bled far more by the fact that three months from then, I’d be leav­ing the city that defined my tran­si­tion from child­hood to adult­hood, los­ing that con­stant con­tact with friends that defines Uni­ver­sity life.

And come June, the inevitable hap­pened, and off we all went.

There’s a lot I don’t miss about that time — the pres­sure of course­work and exams, the phone calls every night until my head felt ready to burst, the hav­ing very lit­tle money — but there’s one thing I really, really do.

I miss the drama.

At the time, I was pretty con­flicted about the giant morass of drama that got dropped on us in what was my third year — I hated it, but it was almost enjoy­able in a weird ironic sort of way. And now I miss it.

I miss the burn­ing feel­ing and the anguish of devel­op­ing crushes on com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate peo­ple. I miss all the knowl­edge of other people’s lives that comes from being so reg­u­larly in con­tact with them. I miss try­ing to fix other people’s bad sit­u­a­tions, I miss suc­ceed­ing, and I miss fail­ing. I miss hav­ing break­fast at KFC, though only two peo­ple know why. I miss bar­ing the con­tents of our hearts until deep into the night. I miss the secrets and the gos­sip. I miss friends becom­ing lovers, and I miss friends becom­ing ene­mies. I miss find­ing the right things to say to the right peo­ple, and I miss fail­ing at that too. I miss falling in love for the first time.

None of that is com­ing back, and per­haps I should be glad of that. After all, I just con­fessed to hat­ing it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all (or was it Absinthe?), so it’s prob­a­bly for the best that it’s all safely con­fined to the past. But once every so often, just like now, I’ll rem­i­nisce about those times long ago.