Facebook Mess Is Coming: You Now Have To Talk To Your Friends not To Be Unfriended

It looks like on the lazy news days during this holiday season many of the mainstream publications have decided that it would be a good idea to discuss the trends in social networking and the peculiarities of behavior of many of us - those who are heavily dependent on our social networks for personal and business communications.

Today’s story is the Wall Street Journal discussing the idea of really being friends online and only staying friends with the people who you happen to communicate with - and deleting all the people who keep silence (for whatever reason this may be) from your network of friends. It is kind of funny watching a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal quoting numerous examples of people unfriending each other and the offenses it can cause to the unfriended ones.

The example quoted by the WSJ is that of a girl Joana Swan who decided to clean her Facebook profile by unfreinding all the people she did not speak to for a while on Facebook. And of course it was no surprise (if you ever unfriended people yourself, you certainly know it is no surprise) that she soon met an acquaintance who was very much offended and wanted to know what she did to offend Miss Swan to the extent of unfriending her.

This new desire to only keep the friends you actually communicate with is painted as a trend of moving from craving for online popularity (and getting hundreds of friends in the process) towards keeping one’s private life actually private online. And of course it is quite understandable that people who don’t really need to have hundreds of connections for any professional reason will be better off only connecting to the people they actually know. But does that really mean you really have to talk to the people to stay social networking friends or is it enough to have these friends sitting in the background (of your mind and of your Facebook profile) for when you want to talk to them?

Of course it all depends on the person and on what your personal ideas about using a service like Facebook are and of course some of online friends may get too noisy to keep them but my personal opinion is that it is actually quite fine not to talk to everyone you are connected unless you both feel like doing so. The reason behind this approach is quite simple: if we all begin to actually talk to each other on Facebook, our Facebook inboxes will turn into a real mess and the email notifications of comments on our status updates and posted items will arrive in hundreds. I suspect that such heavy communications will only turn many people away from Facebook completely.

After all, initially the social networks were not supposed to serve as a tool for communications and the platform where we will be able to talk to our friends and family, share an occasional photo or discuss videos from the family gathering miles away from where we currently live instead of spending a night out together or inviting your cousins to a dinner.

Some of us may remember that the social networks were initially intended to find the people you may have lost contact with and reconnect with them which meant staying in contact and knowing where these people are and what they do - not talking to them every day or every week like it is some kind of social obligation.

There are some natural uses for social networks - like finding a girl you studied in the university with who now lives in France, connecting to her and exchanging occasional updates about your respective lives when one of you feels like doing so. There are such people who we never really were close friends with but are now connected in places like Facebook or MySpace. Would you really want to have to talk to all these people at least every couple of weeks? I personally am quite satisfied that I can shoot these people a note now and then (to arrange a meet-up of classmates, for example) but I certainly would not want to become close friends finally only because we happened to use the same social network.

Besides, there are some friends who we used to be quite close with at one point of time but then lost contact with for some reason - like one of you moving to another city or state. Of course you may not really have to exchange every detail in your life like the details of the latest party or your opinion on the movie you just watched but once you happen to plan a trip to that city your friend (both real-life and social networking friend) lives in you will know exactly where to find this person to arrange a real-life meeting.

Of course the entire issue of only keeping the closest people you actually talk to depends on the approach that fits every single person and some may really have nothing better to do than tracking all the status updates from their Facebook friends, commenting on them and exchanging private emails via Facebook as well. To some people paying attention to everyone you are connected with on Facebook may not even be too difficult as only a rare user will actually have enormous number of friends but at the same time the vast majority will have at least a few dozens after graduating from school and university and spending a couple of years working with different companies.

So even if you are not an internet celebrity who has thousands of contacts, you will still have at least a small crowd of people to keep in touch with. And if you exchange an email with every contact on a regular basis, Facebook may quickly turn from an enjoyable pastime into a dreaded responsibility to talk to numerous people you don’t even want to talk to. So why not stick to keeping in touch and knowing you have friends somewhere instead of actually turning Facebook communications into a tiresome and boring process where everyone absolutely has to send messages to everyone else not to be unfriended?