I Am Unfriended

   In the London Free Press today, there was an article on how our social media lives interact with our actual, daily lives. The subject was "unfriending" people in social media.
   The gist of the article was that being "unfriended" by someone on Facebook muddied up your actual relationship with both that person and, by inference, any mutual circle of friends.
   I had already been thinking of this as a blog topic and the fact that it popped up as an article in the paper seems fortuitous.

   Lately, I have been paying more attention to my friend list on Facebook. There was a time not that long ago when if you'd asked me how many Facebook friends I had I wouldn't have been able to tell you. These days, I know exactly. There is the usual smattering of work friends, relatives, people I went to school with and others who, usually through recreational activities, I have acquired. There are even one or two total strangers, people who I have actually never met. They ended up friends with me only because they were friends of friends or because they maybe went to the same public school fifty years ago. This criteria, by the way, means you could have a "friend" simply because the same sun shines on you, and on and on.
   Why I have been paying attention more so lately to my friend list is because it used to be a fairly round figure that I would occasionally notice and then one day it occurred to me that it was not the same round figure anymore. I had been unfriended by someone.
   At this point, I still don't know exactly who did the dirty deed. This is because there is a tendency to lose track of who your friends actually are. Sometimes you'll see a name and a face pop up so often on other peoples walls that they begin to feel like they're one of your friends, when in fact this isn't so. This kind of clouds the issue as to who my friends are and who they aren't. Then, when I lose one of them, it's a little tricky to figure out who it might have been.
   As I said, someone had unfriended me. I didn't know who it was so I couldn't let it bother me too much. Then, a couple of days later, someone else unfriended me. Fearing a trend, I started to become socially panicked and immediately headed for my friend list, desperate to find out who these people might have been. I started with my closest circle of family and friends and quickly discovered I was no longer friends with my youngest son's girlfriend. This was confusing but upon further investigation I found out that basically she was bowing out of participating in Facebook altogether. So this doesn't really count, I guess. I have been keeping my eye on the friend tally since then and it has remained constant so no worries.
   I have been unfriended before and have no idea why. My first thought was that I said something to offend the person and I had the urge to find out and apologize, if indeed that's what had happened. Respecting the person's privacy, however, I didn't.
   I was the victim of a wave of unfriendings due to work issues, I believe. Many of my Facebook friends are also co-workers and this always presents difficulties when people's private lives collide with their workplace lives. Part of what made this particularly difficult for me was that Doralyn is part of the management group where we both work and this kind of put me in that same category.
   The newspaper article cited a university study which found that forty per cent of people would avoid, in real life, someone who had unfriended them. Other people described having been unfriended by family members and the dysfunction this then caused in the family.

   For my part, I can live with being unfriended as long as it wasn't for something I might have inadvertently said or done which then caused hurt feelings. This would make me feel bad. As for other unfriendings of other kinds, I can live with them. What it does create, though, is a sense that you are no longer trusted with peering through little windows into people's lives, as mundane and run-of-the-mill as they might be. As much as I would try and not let this cloud my relationship with someone who has unfriended me, there still remains a bit of a wall (okay, call it a veil, maybe) between the two of us. The point is made in the newspaper article that in a social media which is free of cost, free of effort and free of guilt by association then, when someone takes the time and effort to search you out and unfriend you, it's hard not to take it personally.
   The article also talks about the loss of self-esteem which arises in the person who has been unfriended and that the pain caused by a relationship breakdown on a social media can actually be greater than if it had occurred in real life. This alone indicates how pervasive social media has become and perhaps even why cyber-bullying now has such a toehold.
   It is good sometimes to have a thick skin and to know where and when to wield it. Someone my age clearly remembers an age when social media did not exist and, as much as it does occasionally give me pause to ponder the odd relationship, it simply will not colour the way I go about interacting with the world around me.