Deleting Facebook friends
Mar 11, 2010 Comments Off
When I heard of our assignment to delete facebook friends for class I got very excited. Maybe it is my playful nature, but I saw this as a perfect opportunity to mess with my friends. Because of this, I think I approached this assignment slightly differently than most of my classmates. Rather than searching through my list of friends and deleting people I no longer wanted to be friends with, I went through and deleted some of my closest friends. I didn’t really know what to expect from this, I guess that I assumed life would go on like normal and as my friends wanted to contact me they would realize I was no longer friends with them they would add me as a friend as laugh it off as a bug in facebooks programming. This is not what happened…
Instead I got a rush of friend requests within three days from half of the people I had de-friended. I also got a message from one friend who asked why I had de-friended her and if I was mad at her. I didn’t expect anyone to pick up on my betrayal so quickly, especially since they don’t get a notification when I de-friend them. I definitely didn’t think anyone would be offended and apologized sincerely.
It was only once I had apologized for deleting her that I realized the real reason I had deleted my closest friends instead of people I don’t talk to. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I was afraid that if I deleted somebody from my friend list who I wasn’t that close to but still knew they would be offended and wouldn’t want to re add me as a friend if they wanted to at some point. As a kid my biggest fear was always that I would exclude some one, and I guess that fear is still present. By deleting my closer friends, I was confident they would pass it off as some strange error and re-friend me. My closer friends would realize it was a joke. It turns out one of my high school friends was hurt by my de friending which makes me wonder how people I’m de friending on purpose would feel. I have kept my friendship list small since I friend rarely and have no problem rejecting friend requests if I don’t want to. However all people I might want to delete are already in a special list I have with its own privacy restrictions. There would be no benefit to me to delete them. The only result of my actions would be the possibility to hurt their feelings, so why would I want to delete them?
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