- submitted by Linda Keenan on 01/06/2009
Hey, Deadbeat Facebook Friends: You're Fired!
By Linda Keenan
Well, it's January, Santa's off the clock, he's getting a Bliss day of beauty right about now, and hopefully all the elves are on a well-deserved bender. But for me, the New Year means I'm amassing my own list and checking it twice. Except my list goes beyond a naughty list. I'll be clear: it's a sh*tlist. Because this year I'm resolved to fire some friends, and if you could see me right now you would see me using the dreaded air quote fingers when I say "friends". These are Facebook friends and I'm leaning strongly towards hitting the "Remove Friend" button on about ten of them.
I'm a stay-at-home Mom in suburbia, with a child who is like a cave man without the club: only the promise of Disney World would lure him out of our house after school. And as an adult starved for adult company, I worship at the secular church of Facebook. There are friendly, familiar faces from every phase of my life on Facebook, and I'm thrilled to keep track of them on their status updates, and no update is too dull for me.
Many people view the act of writing a status update vaguely lame, and the act of reading them religiously like I do, outright pathetic. For me, status updates mimic the chatter of my former workplace, which ranged from the mundane to the slyly humorous to the occasionally outrageous. (For the uninitiated among you, a status update describes what you're doing or thinking about at the moment, as in "Linda is.....staring off into space while her kid is watching Noggin." I know, riveting stuff.)
So for me Facebook is a crucial social life line, one that has reconnected with me with my outer rung of friends, the co-workers I always liked but lost touch with, the high school buddy who taught me how to drive stick.
So why am I about to fire some friends? Among my cast of characters are the terminally silent. These are the "friends" who accepted my friendship request or, even stranger, requested that I join their list of friends, and have never said a word, even after I sent them direct messages through Facebook.
They are the people whose photos I've commented on, with a gracious "awww" or "you look great!" only to get zero reciprocity, even once. I'm not desperate for their friendship (Or am I? Free free to call bullsh*t on me. My husband does it all the time.) But I don't like being reminded, seeing their smiles pop up on my list every day, that I'm being completely, thoroughly, utterly ignored. Sometimes I'll find myself checking their "Walls" (where friends post publicly to each other) to see if they are blowing off other people too, or just me. That's when I start feeling like the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction ("I won't be IGNORED, Dan!)
This may seem like a petty, childish desire: to somehow punish people for not communicating. But it goes to a deeper conviction about friendship that I've developed over the past few years. I've decided to focus my energies on people who care about me instead of wasting time on people who don't. I bet if you asked the Facebook friends on my sh*tlist if they cared about me, even on a very surface level, they would all say yes. But thinking you're friends with someone and being a friend are two very different things.
In a weird way, I want to make a stand for the friends who do walk the walk, by publicly rejecting those who just talk the talk (or in this case don't talk at all.) This would be more than an act of righteous bitchery; many of these "friends" are career contacts. If I fire them, would they ever hire me down the road? Well, as I might say on my Facebook update, Linda is....pissed off enough to take that risk.
Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy. ...read more rants
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