On Facebook, you can hide friends so that their status updates won’t show in your feed. Rob Walker is worried: what kind of friend are you if you decide that your friend’s half of the conversation isn’t valuable? Wouldn’t it be better just not to friend them? I am less concerned, for two reasons, one serious, and one legendary:
- “Friending” someone on Facebook is acknowledging a weak tie. Yes, you sat behind me in concert band in high school. You emptied your spit valve. I therefore acknowledge you as an acquaintance and accept your request to be a friend. I will look at your pictures. I will look at the pictures of your child in a bumblebee costume. I will see that you finished college. I will see that you have a new car. I will see that you crashed your bicycle. I will see that you need a sheep, cow, and pig for your Farmville. I will see that you like your vampire teevee shows. (I will carry your lip balm.) Hiding someone’s status updates is less like refusing to listen to an ongoing conversation and more like failing to seek out a former acquaintance to chat even though one is genuinely if momentarily happy to hear through the grapevine that the person is doing well.
- If someone posts LOLcats several times a day in 2010, it is morally obligatory to hide them. This is for their own good.
The Edge of the American West 
17 comments
October 5, 2010 at 9:14 am
politicalfootball
I will see that you need a sheep, cow, and pig for your Farmville.
No. Never.
To Facebook’s credit, they allow you to block those stupid games without blocking everything else.
October 5, 2010 at 9:30 am
Tom
I imagine people who think “friend” on Facebook means the same thing as “friend” in real life do not really know what Facebook is or how it works. One hears versions of this meme a lot (“Friendship/human contact/society is disintegrating in the age of the Intertubes!”) and it’s really annoying.
October 5, 2010 at 9:30 am
jvhillegas
@politicalfootball: Word.
October 5, 2010 at 9:32 am
rosmar
There are also people who are real friends and fun enough face-to-face who write status updates like “BE PART OF THE SOLUTION, NOT PART OF THE PROBLEM!!!!!!” and, for the sake of your face-to-face friendship, you have to hide their statuses from yourself.
October 5, 2010 at 10:56 am
SeanH
@Tom: yes, I think a lot of Facebook’s detractors are genuinely confused on this point – thinking that being “friends” on Facebook is an overt signal of real friendship, rather than a technical term connected only metaphorically to actual friend-status.
October 5, 2010 at 11:41 am
Kieran
an overt signal of real friendship, rather than a technical term connected only metaphorically to actual friend-status
Give it time, give it time.
In the meanwhile, COPY THIS INTO YOUR STATUS IF YOU HAVE LOST SOMEONE YOU LOVE.
October 5, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Evan
I hid someone who automatically updates their status with their latest tweets, and they attend a lot of conferences, so my friend feed was constant updates of what some speaker said. It was horrible.
October 5, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Herbert Browne
It’s a trade-off… and perhaps a saving grace, in the “personal mental health” department, that Updates can be managed. Otherwise I might have already expired as a victim of my own terminal snarkolepsy. ^..^
October 5, 2010 at 12:48 pm
dana
COPY THIS INTO YOUR STATUS IF YOU HAVE LOST SOMEONE YOU LOVE.
I just had a great idea for an ethics paper topic based on balancing competing obligations as understood by Facebook status. COPY THIS INTO YOUR STATUS IF YOU THIRST FOR JUSTICE.
October 5, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Herbert Browne
@dana, it’s hard to beat beatitudinal thinking…
(although great fun to deconstruct)
^..^
October 5, 2010 at 4:08 pm
silbey
One hears versions of this meme a lot (“Friendship/human contact/society is disintegrating in the age of the Intertubes!”) and it’s really annoying.
Agreed. I find that Facebook is actually the reverse: it’s brought me back into the lives of a lot of people I’d lost track of over the years. It sort of recreates the medium level of friends. You’ve stopped being a daily part of their lives (moving, changed jobs, etc) but they’re not quite good enough friends to visit. Now, the connection is back.
October 5, 2010 at 10:01 pm
kathy a.
also, fyi — de-friending annoying people is not painful. they don’t get notice or anything; they just stop seeing your stuff, and you never have to see theirs again.
October 6, 2010 at 10:22 am
Brock
I have periodic amnesties, in which I unhide all the people that I’ve recently hidden.
Surprisingly, a lot of people stay unhidden. And there are a handful that always get re-hidden almost immediately.
Also, hiding a friend doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to read her status updates. Sometimes it just means you need to mentally prepare yourself.
A voluntary system of tagging might work, if enough people complied. I might hide everything tagged “political” and “religious”, but view things tagged as “family”.
October 6, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Jason B.
COPY THIS IN YOUR STATUS IF YOU HID SOMEONE YOU LOVE AND SUBSEQUENTLY LOST THEM.
October 7, 2010 at 8:40 am
jeffbowers
I see hiding people simply as a means of managing content. Hiding means you can’t be bothered with them today; de-friending means you can’t be bothered with the person at all.
October 7, 2010 at 9:23 am
bitchphd
I stupidly decided to friend a lot of people from high school whose present-day activities I was curious about, only to find that most of them are (at least according to their FB statuses) either republican assholes or else only use FB to play sparkle. I view hiding their status updates as the tactful thing to do, and I assume that most of them have likewise hidden mine on the grounds that I am clearly a holier-than-thou liberal who feels compelled to post Outraged Comments with links to news stories a hundred times a day.
October 9, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Baaaa
There was a period of time when I moved almost 20 times in nine years, and hence lost track of several people who were also moving around a bit (not as much, but enough that we lost touch). Many of us have ended up quite spread out and being FB friends has allowed us to get back in touch and see each other a few times a year. It’s been a year of reconnection for me because of FB and I couldn’t be happier.
On the other hand, there are some friends who are getting blocked due to sports season starting and I am tired of the 15 posts per game. I will let them back into my life when the world series/superbowl/stanley cup/ games are over. Also too, the ones who sent friend requests mainly so they could spam me with wares they are hocking. Especially if I am in the same business.
And y’all have forgotten an important aspect of those COPY THIS IN YOUR STATUS notes. That is MOST PEOPLE WON’T CARE ABOUT PUPPY KILLERS/INJUSTICE/TERMINALLY ILL CHILDREN/WORLD HUNGER/SPECIAL OLYMPICS/FREE SPEECH/JUSTICE FOR _____, BUT IF YOU ARE IN THE 1% WHO DO, COPY THIS IN YOUR STATUS.
Good grief, the passive aggressive guilt just makes me want to punch someone.