Unfriend fallout

Estimates are that around 25 per cent of the time that people spend online using the internet is spent using social media like Twitter and Facebook. Social media is something of a paradox: you are theoretically connected to a bigger network of people than has ever been possible before, yet you are physically sitting alone. It is not an experience that humans have evolved to deal with and the psychological implications remain to be fully understood. In the secure safety of your home, you can interact in ways that you would never do face to face or even voice to voice. Along with the faux celebrity of social media comes illusory anonymity, and that cocktail leads to some interesting behaviour. Now a new study has added to the research showing that this online behaviour has real world consequences by looking at the fallout that results from “unfriending” on Facebook.

For the uninitiated (there could be some reading this who have avoided Facebook), when you “friend” someone on Facebook you become connected to them; you see their “posts” and they see yours. You share images, ideas, can chat directly and do all the things that make up a “friend”-ship without ever actually having to see each other. If you decide you don’t want to share all of that with someone anymore, you can “unfriend” them. But these researchers wanted to know what the effect of “unfriending” might be.

After surveying social media users, the researchers found that 40 per cent of people said that they would avoid in real life anyone who unfriended them on Facebook. A remaining 10 per cent were unsure what they would do. So for almost one in every two people, an online action will have consequences for real life. Interestingly, more women and men reported that they would avoid people who had unfriended them. The most dominant feeling was that people felt that they were punished for something that they had done in real life by the unfriending. However, previous studies by these researchers have shown that the four major reasons for Facebook unfriending are: frequent unimportant posts; divisive posts about politics or religion; sexist or racist posts; or frequent boring posts about everyday life.

The researchers point out that in the real world when a friendship ends it tends to just fade away. On Facebook though it is done abruptly and unilaterally, with one party declaring the relationship at an end. So in the virtual world we are facing a milieu that has not existed before and the etiquette rules are waiting to be written.

It is interesting, too, that the researchers here use the term “real” life to describe the non-online world. It suggests that even in the mind of the researchers there is an assumption that the online world is somehow less valid than the rest of our experience. Future generations may not be so dismissive of the virtual world, but for now it is enough to know that the two worlds not only collide but spill into each other. So, before you unfriend someone, stop and remind yourself that even though you can’t see, hear, touch or smell them it doesn’t mean they are un-human.