I’ve been having this conversation for a while amongst my real life friends and after reading Schmidlap’s post today I figured there wasn’t a better time to finally get it out of my head and into the world.
I joined Facebook sometime in the Spring semester of my senior year of college as a way to keep in touch with the small handful of folks that I had met and had an actual, genuine interest in keeping in touch with. My friend list for the first 6 months probably never got higher than 15 and that was fine by me.
Fast forward to today. It hasn’t grown that much but I am up to 90 “close and personal” Facebook friends. That first group that I joined for? Yeah, barely even talk to them anymore, just a random comment here and there, but as each season passes even that gets less and less. And with this growing group and growing usage amongst a population not originally intended (a year or so back FB changed their rules that you could use any old email to start up an account, previously you had to have a high school or college email) has come the ghost ask.
The ghost ask is when you receive (or send) that friend request out to an old classmate, coworker, guy who rode the same bus as you 20 years ago. It comes with no personalized message, no reminder of who the hell they are. To make a ghost ask complete however is once accepted all conversation ceases. Not a word is said, not a comment made, not a hey how ya doin? Nothing.
Where does this come from? Is it our need to expand our superficial ranking in an imaginary world? Do we think that maybe we might actually want to talk with this person but when confronted with the option realize we have nothing to say? Do we want to show where we are, what we’ve done, accomplishments, hot new tattoos all without having to actually interact or attend some dreadful reunion where these things used to take place? I’ll admit, I’ve done it. I’ve sent out requests because I saw that we had 3…4…7 friends in common and that’s it. I hadn’t thought of this person in 15 years until my handy “People You May Know” sidebar suggested them. Some days I wonder how many of the 90 people listed are actually my friends.
On another Facebook related rant, and the actual reason I began writing this, another phenomenon has recently caught my attention. People are “de-friending” each other over status updates. Yup, that’s right, status updates. It’s the one line statement we update constantly to tell our imaginary online world what we are doing or thinking or throwing things at. Some are more witty than others, but it is a nice easy way to keep your fingers on the pulse of your network. I personally like to post music lyrics every once in awhile and see which of my friends make a comment or finish the line.
It’s also a quick and easy way to find out that many of your ghost ask friends have very, very different views from you. And in these heated and trying times, when lines are being drawn and fences built around political beliefs, we as a nation are standing up and silently de-friending those we don’t agree with. It’s almost comical. I’ve almost done it. It is only the grossly unattractive addiction of seeing what ridiculous thing they could possibly come up with that has kept me from hitting the “x” on our cyber friendship.
The only saving grace is that for the majority of these folks I will never actually interact with them (save for one unfortunate family member).
Friday, October 31, 2008
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2 comments:
Yeah, I have a couple of ghost asks in my list, too. Recently I've tightened up the standards on my friend list. The criterion is something like this: if I couldn't sustain a conversation with the person for more than 5 minutes about our shared past, I ignore the add. And I've stopped sending them out almost entirely.
I was defriended once, too. I have no exact idea why...I wasn't watching closely enough to notice exactly when he left, and fb doesn't have a feature to notify you when the event occurs. You just have to figure it out.
That would be a helpful feature. "XXX defriended you at 9:35pm after you changed your Status to 'suck it, republican freaks!'"
I've been more picky with my facebook friends - I think I've actually met almost all of them. I have a few that I've simply had a blog/twitter friendship with for a period of time. I've thought of making a "group" for ""friends" I don't know"
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