Tech provocateur Harper Reed (left) and artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer celebrate the loss of friendship at Rhizome's "Seven on Seven" conference. Image by Daniel Stuckey
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Their product was called Friend Fracker, a web site that, with a few clicks, randomly deletes between one and ten friends from your Facebook account, without informing those friends or informing you whoâs been eliminated. As Lozano-Hemmer explained it, âThe art is not knowing who was deleted. The way we see it is, if you donât know who was deleted, they arenât as good a friend [as you thought].â"It’s a good excuse to delete all those people anyway. And if they say, 'why did you unfriend me?' you say, ‘oh, I went on Friend Fracker.'"—Harper Reed
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But the anxiety I experienced when I attempted to use it was instructive. Because I wrote this over the span of a few days, it also forced me to notice that my friend count had dropped by one. Why? Did I offend someone? Did someone die? Maybe someone just closed his or her account. Iâll never know, but even that tiny bit of uncertainty is enough to provoke some uneasiness.Thatâs because Facebook friendships matter. Sure, some of them are less meaningful than others. But itâs a tired and crotchety argument to call our online friend circles shallower, somehow, than our ârealâ ones. Our online social networksâparticularly on Facebookâare based on real-world social interactions, where levels and forms of intimacy vary in all the same ways they do online. The connections are always real on some level, however perfunctory.*****In 2010, I wrote an article about the psychology and real world implications of defriending for the New York Times. The term âdefriendingâ had just been added to the Oxford American Dictionary that same year. It seemed that defriending, with its attendant anxieties, had become a fact of life. At that time, Facebook estimated it had 500 million active users worldwide, and the average number of friends among users was about 130.Here was the kind of social insouciance most of us wished we had, made easy.
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It seems reasonable to infer that, for most of us, our Facebook âfriendshipâ circles are widening beyond our real-life connections, watering down the mixture. Researchers at Columbia recently used some creative accounting to estimate that the average American knows about 600 people (though they only know âjust 10 to 25 people well enough to say they trust them,â the researchers say).Those estimates could be a tad high (previous studies using the same method came up with 290). Still the point isnât lost. Viewed one way, collecting Facebook friends is a bit like collecting baseball cards. I have 1,084 friends online. Off line, Iâm lucky most months if I see my closest friends more than twice, even if they live just a few subway stops away. Thereâs a good chance a few among those 1,084 are expendable.For that Times article, I asked Irene Levine, a clinical psychiatry professor at the NYU School of Medicine, about what she had observed with regard to the psychological effects of defriending. Her opinion, based on her extensive primary research on friendships, confirmed what many of us already knew by experience.âEmotionally, it can be the same as being dumped because itâs one-sided,â she said. âWhile the defriender may have been grappling with the decision to defriend for some time, it comes out of the blue for the person defriended.âWhich is fair enough when itâs someone youâve known on an intimate basis. But for those Facebook friends you canât even remember meeting? Iâm convinced thereâs a little part of us thatâs activated more by some kind of hoarding instinct here than by human empathy.@AustinConsidine"Emotionally, being defriended can be the same as being dumped because it’s one-sided."—Irene Levine, NYU clinical psychiatry professor