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Facebook Defriending is on the Rise

Siteseeing

By: Anthony Augustine

Posted: 03/1/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Facebook login webpage. Many are reconsidering just who they "friend" on the popular social network.

rww.to/FB_unfriending

Facebook Defriending is on the Rise

WITH the move to transfer over all users to the new Timeline look, reluctant Facebookers are having to take stock of their digital lives. Back in the early days of social networking (it feels strange to even write that), most users tended to add a wide range of people, from longtime friends to old classmates from grade school to co-workers and in some cases, even those random people they met at some party. Now everyone and his dog has a Facebook profile and most don't really represent the really important relationships in users' lives.

New users of social media also tended to share a lot, whether it was mundane status updates, blurry camera-phone shots of a drunken night out or way too much information about that extended trip overseas. Now that people have had some time to adapt to the changing social-media landscape, they are rethinking how much they should be sharing and who they should be sharing that information with.

Sure, you can set up filters and permissions for content and keep people walled off, but wouldn't it just be easier to trim your friends list to the people who are actually your friends? Isn't the point of sites like Facebook to share the details of your social life with the people who are important to you?

But how much do you share and with whom? Facebook is pushing users to share every detail of their lives, but is that what we want?

People also use The Book as a communication tool instead of email, but that can't be the only reason why you hang on to that bloated friends list. Is it? Do you really need your boss on Facebook? Your neighbour? Or you ex? Or somebody you haven't seen or spoken to (and probably don't care to) for years? Probably not.

A new study suggests that "people don't want to collect as many Facebook friends as possible. Social networkers are becoming more selective, managing their accounts and 'pruning' people from their lists" writes Read Write Web's Alicia Elier. "More users are untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and unfriending others. Women and younger users tend to prune more than others: 67 per cent of women with social-network site profiles have deleted users, compared with 58 per cent of men."

Users are obviously becoming more selective with whom they let in their network. In some cases, they're going back through their friends' list and trimming people from it, rather than dealing with Facebook's constantly changing privacy settings.

This trend is also tied into our reluctance to share everything, the way boss Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team want. Timeline is also pushing users who are increasingly uncomfortable with sharing so much of their digital lives to go on a deletion spree, culling content they have put on the site over the years in an losing battle to try and cut back on what Facebook shows the world.

While all this is activity is partially driven by the move to the new Timeline features, it also reflects our changing understanding and relationship with social media, our digital lives and the web.

Anthony Augustine is a freelance music, technology and pop culture writer who spends way too much time in front of a computer. Got a site you think he should see? Email him at anthony.siteunseen@gmail.com or follow him at twitter.com/anthonya.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 1, 2012 E3

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