Un-friending: a social media odyssey

Exhibit A

Please refer to Exhibit A.

That’s me scrolling through Facebook.

How did I get there? To be honest, I don’t know.

That’s what social media does to you nowadays. It sits idly in your brain, like one of those pesky background process you forgot to disable, waiting to take admin privileges and seize control.

Social media is our captain now.

Before you know it, you’re swiping through pics of Tiffany’s yoga retreat in Thailand.

Thailand looks dope, you think to yourself. And Tiffany’s gone hard on the hashtags. #lifesabeach. Good one.

Her play on words is fittingly ironic, Tiffany has a good life.

Scroll down further. Now it’s that dude Ryan. He’s kicking it with the bros. #brewskis #watchingthegame.

Who are Ryan and Tiffany? You have no idea. You met them once.

But when you added them as Facebook friends back in ’08, you entered a mutually beneficial contract. A contract in which you got to increment your friend counter, and in exchange had to serve as a cheerleading bystander to their online projection. You pump my stats, I pump yours.

That’s the currency we trade today. I give you clout, you give me the highlights reel of your scripted life. And when the time comes for me to post a pic, you grace my ego with a ‘like’.

It feels good, until it doesn’t. Until you need another hit.

But when does the cycle end? I have two thoughts.

On the one hand, it will never end. The next iteration of this social game will come when people realise that their fake friends add more monetary value than their real ones. Influence, power, ad revenue. And when that time comes we’ll be bragging about our audiences, not our friends.

On the other hand, it’s already ended. I’ve currently got somewhere in the region of 700 Facebook friends (rookie numbers, I know). But I probably maxed out on real friends at 50, maybe 100.

That’s my limit. That’s your limit. But here we are, continuing to play the game.

So here’s my proposal: embrace culling season. Un-friend the randos. Free yourself from the audience you never intended to have.

Or don’t. And I’ll see you on my feed.