defriending

David Spark, a new media consultant and producer, interviewed me a few evenings ago on the awkwardness of social network defriending (e.g, taking someone off your friends list on Facebook, Linked In, MySpace, or Twitter). Here is the link to David's piece called The Awkwardness of De-friending. (You may notice that the jury is still out on whether defriending is hyphenated.)

Since there are no commonly accepted rules on the etiquette of how to go about ending face-to-face friendships, imagine how murky the rules of behavior are in defriending in cyberspace. The act of defriending is as easy as hitting a key but your decision can have long-lasting repercussions, both for you and the person you defriend.

My advice: Before you defriend someone, face-to-face or in cyberspace, take time to think before you act. Depending on the nature of your relationship, social media defriending can be the emotional equivalent of being jilted or jilting someone else. If the friendship was once meaningful and you change your mind after you've defriended someone, your relationship will never be the same. Don't let your fingers work more quickly than your mind.

David also wrote a piece published on Mashable, 12 Great Tales of De-friending and another on his own blog When technology tells us we have no friends. You may want to take a look at one of my earlier blog entries too, Online friending and defriending patterns.

Having a hard time time cutting off a toxic friendship? Social networks not only make it easier to collect “friends,” they make "defriending" a breeze because it just takes one simple stroke of the keyboard.

In the real world, according to an article in UK Times Online, most people have about five close friends and an extended network of 150 people who they consider more distant acquaintances. (That number is based on a study conducted in the 1990s at Liverpool University in northwest England.) In cyberspace, users of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have about the same number of close friends but often collect huge numbers of virtual friends, a phenomenon dubbed “MySpace whoring.” When numbers get that large, the ties become more tenuous.

Speaking to the British Association (BA) Festival of Science at York University Dr. Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University points out that social networks make it easy to friend and defriend. If someone is annoying or isn’t behaving acceptably, you can simply take them off your list of friends.

“Normally a friendship will fade out,” says Dr. Reader. “You gradually lose contact. On these sites you remove them. It’s a type of spring clean and the other persons know they’ve been removed,” adds Reader.

Given the pervasive myth of BFF, seems like it is never easy to end a friendship even if you have a button to help do the job.