Social Purge

I have been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends.

This has certainly been a long time coming. Between Facebook’s byzantine controls and my ample friends list, the site was all but useless to me. Every login greeted me with event invitations, mass messages, substance-free status updates and substance-filled photo albums. I briefly tried forcing my existing friends list into some kind of organizational structure, but with the terrible “page by page” interface doing so was too much of a timesink.

Now that I’ve gotten rid of the chance acquaintances, the people I friended because they were hot, the archive of student government members, and other miscellaneous “friends,” I’ve ensured that I’ll actually know (or at least recognize) the people I’m adding back as friends (of course, if you actually noticed I was missing from your list, feel free to re-add me). I’m also going to be “tagging” people with various groups based on how I know them and how much active interest I have in their lives.

Remember how during freshman year the final response to a given situation was the creation of a Facebook group about it? I got rid of all those, eliminated extraneous applications, and “un-liked” all kinds of organizations and causes. This should greatly cut down on the amount of mass messaging I get (if only there were filters for the Facebook inbox).

The cynically humorous part of all this is that 94% of these “friends” aren’t even going to notice, including a number of folks I actually like. I’m seriously offended by some of these people—my great high school friends that I hung out with all the time. A lot of them missed the memo that online communication was the future, so Facebook is pretty much the extent of their digital presence. This means that keeping up with them involved actual effort on my part, including such initiatives as calling or texting.

I invited all of them to my wedding (most attended) and not a single one of them that has gotten married since then has sent me so much as an announcement. I’ve only found out, months later (thanks, Facebook, for burying the interesting stuff beneath piles of garbage), by noticing changes in last names. The guys could have been married twice with a kid by now and I’d have no idea. Perhaps this will be cathartic.