This post is REALLY long. I’ve included headings that might help you navigate the boring bits, but skip to the bottom because it has the best parts.

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I have a lot of Facebook friends.  As of May 2010, I am clocking in somewhere near 1000 connections, though I’m sure that kind of number is far from unheard of on the Interwebs.  Still, I’d say it’s significant.  I believe I saw a statistic somewhere that mentioned that the average Facebook user has upwards of 400 Facebook friends, although some sociologists get all whiney about the Dunbar number and say you can only ever really have 150 stable social connections and yadda yadda yadda.  Listen, we all know there is a big difference between an on-line friend and a IRL friend, though often a personal connection can represent both.  In other words, I think the sociologists should find other silly facts to get all uppity about and let us have our social networking fun.

Being a man who works in social media, I find it important to have many Facebook friends for several reasons.  For starters, it expands my potential reach and overall presence on the Web (or, if you’re in marketing, it’s the more eyeballs the better).  When I produce a new video, write a new blog entry, find something remarkable in connection to a professional venture, or otherwise publish worthwhile personal- or business-related material, my 1000 connections get to see that.  And because I’m such an egotist, 1000 just isn’t enough – I ‘Add as a Friend’ just about anyone that I meet (this also helps me remember who they are as well as get to know a little bit about them based on their ‘Info’).

It’s all about reach…

Now, before you accuse me of thinking that my friends are just numbers to me, let me illustrate what I’m really talking about here in terms of online reach: a couple of months ago I had the privilege of producing a video of an awareness event for the Greater Northwest Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.  Volunteering in this capacity, I found out through the Chapter that the video was to air as part of a special program regarding MS on a local university’s TV channel.  Through my on-line social connections I was able to inform a social networking specialist at the local NBC TV affiliate, who in turn relayed word about the event to their thousands of Twitter followers, so those followers in turn could be aware and come out for the event that day.  None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for my drive to ‘Add’ everyone I meet, including this TV station’s social media person.  Although the our social network indicates we’re Friends, in reality we hardly know one another.  But, by knowing her something great happened; it’s got nothing to do with merely numbers – every number is a real person, and good things happen when you’re dealing with real people!

…which brings me to my topic – the silent unfriend, or rather, the sad fact that the silent unfriend even happens.

Putting the ‘Myspace’ in Facebook

Now, this is purely conjecture, but it appears that for many people, Facebook is as much about connecting and sharing with friends and loved ones as it is about narrowcasting to the world, at least to some circle of connections, what you’re all about. danah boyd could probably speak better to this, at least when it comes to Myspace, that digital badlands of youth self-identification, but overall I’d say plenty of self-identifying similarly takes place in the way Facebook profiles are populated and maintained by individual users.  This would certainly apply to who we’re Friends with, because even that list of Facebook friends can say a lot about who a person is – or, at least, who they want the world to think they are.

“I unfriend, therefore I am“

With that ‘self-identification via one’s Friends list’ in mind, there appear to be countless submissions across the Web on the topic of unfriending.  Yes, Oxford’s 2009 Word of the Year, “unfriend“, the act of removing a connection from an on-line social network, has become common parlance.  Lovers unfriending exes over their broken relationships, children unfriending nosy parents, employees unfriending overly-informed bosses, etc, etc.  Generally, there always seems to be some legitimate, viable cause for the unfriend – and it always seems to receive plenty of attention amongst those affected.  It says a lot to proclaim to the world that you’ve unfriended someone.

Silently unfriending

But, then there is the silent, seemingly baseless unfriend.  The one you don’t notice until one day, as you’re looking up some certain somebody to share a link with or ask a question of or otherwise reconnect, you realize that you and that person are no longer listed as friends.  They’ve silently, quietly, casually unfriended you.  And this happens in silence because Facebook, for matters of obvious privacy, does nothing to inform you that you’ve been unfriended.

Reasons for a silent unfriend: 1) Digital Housecleaning

In trying to think of reasons why a connection might silently unfriend a person, several ideas come to mind.  The first I would link to simple housecleaning, although this digital housecleaning is not without certain meanings.  Perhaps you’ve been silently unfriended because the person thinks they were never really friends with you to begin with, or they haven’t heard very much from you apart from occasional postings in their News Feed, or they previously meant to unfriend you for otherwise legitimate reasons like those seen above, but just never got around to it.

2) Image

Then, what next comes to mind is more in the self-identification realm.  Perhaps they’ve unfriended you because they don’t want others to know or think that you’re friends – that that connection might say something to the world about their identity which they feel they don’t have the social capital to pay for.

3) Annoying applications, annoying people

Third, I think about simple “nuisance factors”, although I think this says more about the unfriending party’s ability to employ Facebook’s robust filtering and application-blocking options than it does about the annoying unfriended party.  Sometimes one-too-many Farmville invitations are enough to warrant a silent unfriend.  Or constantly updating one’s status with the contents of one’s day in such a way that virtually begs for an unfriend (warning: link not safe for the easily offended).

4) “Omg U R so creapy (sic)”

Fourth, but sometimes most frighteningly obvious, is that a Facebook user is fearful of an old connection having access to too much of their personal data.  Is that creepy ex-boyfriend stalking you?  How can you really know?  Is he STANDING OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW RIGHT NOW WATCHING YOU READ THIS? and so forth.

But, as pertinent or innocuous as any of these above-mentioned reasonings may be, the sad reality is that so much is not achieved by way of the silent unfriend.  If Facebook’s constantly eroding privacy policies have anything to say about it, the termination of a friend connection by someone who just doesn’t want to deal with the unfriended person any more, despite whatever previous association they might have mutually experienced, doesn’t really do much anything to block them from a great deal of publicly available data.  Granted, fear of being stalked or engaging in unwanted exchanges completely warrants an unfriend – but it might not do anything to stop the unwelcome behavior in real life.

The truth

All of these things aside, ultimately, I’m going to go with a fifth and final reason for why most unfriends take place – they just don’t like you any more.  Or maybe they never did to begin with and they were just being nice when they accepted your initial friend request (although it’s more obvious their feelings have turned if they were the one’s to originally request you).  I often come across old friends that I have noticed have given me the silent unfriend and think to myself: “I’ve done nothing I know of to offend this person. I haven’t even spoken or interfaced with them in ages.  What gives?”  In this new dawn of Likes and Unlikes, could it be they’ve just decided to Unlike me?

I’m a firm believer that people rarely act under coercion or by sheer random chance – they only do what they want to do.  If a person silently unfriends me, it’s because they don’t want to carry some supposed extra social weight, the “responsibility” of being a Facebook friend.

The non-responsibility of being an on-line friend

But, seriously, let’s face it, is there really much responsibility associated with being a digital friend?  Most people just leave their connections on the Friends list, and in doing so, in doing nothing, they’ve already met their social obligation to them.  It’s nothing like in real life, where actual conversation or genuine interaction might be called for.  While I believe that social media is the perfect analogue for real-life social interactions, sans restrictions of geography or time, I don’t presuppose that that comes with some mystical, additional social responsibility.  There is nothing uncomfortable about the online Social, when compared with real life’s social quandaries.  Turn off the computer, pretend you lost your Wi-Fi connection, or just click ‘Ignore’ to begin with.  Not adding a friend is so much more ambiguous in meaning than what actually adding them inherently implies.  The fact that you’re not even in the same room really saves a lot of personal anxiety!

A word of warning against the silent unfriend

In conclusion, before you silently unfriend that old connection, think about the true meaning of digital friendship.  It really has no meaning, so there’s not much to lose in maintaining it, but there might be much to gain by keeping it up.  The next time that random someone posts they’ve just completed research on your favorite medical topic, or that they’ve struck it rich and they’re buying everyone lunch, or that they’ve found the location of Amelia Earhart’s plane which they discovered on their expedition to the south Pacific, or, (and I so wish this would happen to me) their best friend Shaquille O’Neal is having a house party and his friends are welcome to bring guests, you won’t be missing out because your ego is too big for a few extra numbers on your computer screen.  As you can tell, the ‘silent unfriend’ only creates silence in an age where “knowing is half the battle”.  Let this be a warning to you.

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