Today was, supposedly, "National Un-Friend Day" on Facebook. My own "collection" of 826 people, with whom I enjoy enormously erratic levels of interpersonal connection, does sometimes cause me pause. And for a few minutes, I thought about dropping perhaps a dozen distant acquaintances from my list--people I might or might not recognize if I encountered them at Wegmans.
But then I remembered Doug Newton's recent editorial in Light & Life magazine, and I thought, "Would B.T. Roberts really have amassed 2,000+ friends by now? And, if so, should I strive for that level of connectivity? Or, would B.T. (whom I consider a hero in the faith, and myself his direct descendant in the Free Methodist denomination)--would this spiritual giant have chosen to "hang out" online, or would he have invested himself in other ventures, reaching out to people and promoting his passion for justice, redemption, and purity of heart in ways that surpassed this oft-times superficial venue for human interaction? Or would B.T. Roberts' own maturation and the development of his ideals have been thwarted by too many games of Bejeweled Blitz?
And by the time I'd considered all that and become thoroughly baffled by my own confusing set of questions, I got distracted by some other urgent electronic plea for my attention, and I didn't care to attempt the tedious and taxing task of paring down my list.
(Do you suppose this resistance to friend sorting has anything to do with my propensity for clutter? Blech! Forget I asked that! These are people, not Post-It Notes! Does anyone else find this Facebook phenomenon, this culture-altering tidal wave of cacophonous communication, more than a little unsettling...?)
3 comments:
You can 'hide' individuals that you don't want to see their updates. That way you can still be 'friends' with them, but go about things as if you weren't. They're none the wiser.
Oh, if you want to 'hide' someone, if you hover over their update, over in the top right corner of their post is an 'x.' It will give you options to hide that application's updates or that specific person.
Thursday night, I deleted about 100 people from my account. I didn't know about the National Day but I struggle with having 500 "friends". Really 500? A lot of people don't talk to me at all. I deleted those people. People that I wasn't related to, weren't using FB much, etc. The problem is some of them have already asked to come back as my friend. It's ridiculous! I'll have to blog about this some time myself.
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