“Friend No More”

Sure, I participate in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, MeetUp plus numerous other niche sites relevant to my career and personal life. Each requires some amount of basic information and most, if not all, contribute to the social part of social networking by asking me to invite, select or approve various contacts I have submitted, searched for or been asked about. As a tool to meet people, the act of online networking is a bit like being the only female bee in an all-male hive. Sure, you have no end to the opportunities to make friends, but the contacts are visceral, polite and a good chunk of the time as swiftly abandoned.

In addition to having groups on various shared interests (like to yoga? They got yoga groups. like indie film? They got indie film groups. like swinging singles? You are not alone!), the most interesting element I have found on these sites is the act of defriending. Authenticated recently as an actual dictionarified slang phrase, this is when you remove someone from your friends (or approved contacts) listing. This activity has become so important that it has moved one software company to develop Defriended, which “lets you quickly discover which one of your acquaintances no longer deems you friend-worthy” (Dahlquist, 2010).

In terms of group dynamic, I think these online sites are in fact highly malleable groups existing in an temporal and interspatial environment (see “phantasmagoria of the interior”, one of my favorite phrases ever). On the internet, fantasy and reality can easily converge through activities like Mafia Wars and our personal group, as defined by our own sense of contact to others, is in fact, limited to our own sense of contact. Maybe this could be defined more as our ‘reach’ or ‘network’. Numbers of our personal groups can hit astronomically unmanageable heights if you are famous, but most of us wallow in the hundreds as we collect up names and faces we rarely see after that initial re-introduction (or in some cases, introduction). As Purdue social psychologist Kip Williams said in a CNN.com article, “That’s the way it’s becoming; this is how we interpret our worth. People care how many [online] friends they have” (Hare, 2009).

The act of unfriending, then “can be a jarring experience, especially considering that the person who dumped you at some point either requested you as a friend or accepted your request (on Facebook, that is how friends are made)” (Quenqua, 2009). Rationales often range form the simplifying of numbers (Hare, 2009) to disappointment and anger. In this online environment, “not all unfriendings are equal. There seem to be several varieties, ranging from the completely impersonal to the utterly vindictive. First is the simple thinning of the herd, removing that grad student you met at a party two years ago and haven’t spoken to since or that kid from middle school you barely remember.” (quenqua, 2009).

What’s interesting, and I can’t find the study specifically (thought, it is mentioned in one of the articles on this subject) is that within this kind of interactive space, being refused does affect person being refused physically. In what were called “cyberball” studies, participants were asked to play a tossing game with a computer, and after so often, the computer would just ignore the human player. The individuals being refused reported feelings of anger and lower levels of self-esteem, and this was just a computer (Hare, 2009)!

So, to bring it all back, the internet is a communal space, but social psychologists as well as other academic pools are just starting to determine the impact that social interactivity is able to have on individuals physically and emotionally. I do see these social networking sites as group environments, but with a certain anonymity and unstable mixture of the fantastical and the real. Quite fascinating.

Any thoughts on this?

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REF

Dahlquist, D., (January, 2010). “Defriended lets you track defrienders on Facebook”. Macworld.com. Retrieved fromhttp://www.macworld.com/article/145687/2010/01/defriended.html.

Hare, B., (October, 2009). “Defriending can bruise your ‘digital ego'”. Cnn.com. Retrieved fromhttp://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/30/online.rejection.defriending/index.html

Wuenqua, D., (January, 2009). “Friends, Until I Delete You”. The New York Times. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1.