Fast Times at Facebook High
I don't know how we managed to live without online drama in those halcyon pre-social media days. When you got into a dispute with someone, you were generally there when it happened, and you knew who you were in and out with and why. These little 0s and 1s have expanded our universes, but not only at a cost of immense time-wasting. It's become possible to make and lose friendships without even knowing.
Back in LJ days, when I had dozens of friends of varying real-life connectedness posting (including my wife, child and eldest niece at various times), there was a lot more back and forth and a lot of words being exchanged that could easily be misunderstood. The message you'd get if you got into one of those misunderstandings was blunt and harsh:
so_and_so removed you from their friendslist.
I don't know if Dreamwidth, my current hosting site, even has such a thing, and I can't recall ever getting such a notice. For one thing, this site doesn't describe your fellow bloggers as "friends;" you "subscribe" and "grant access" to each other. Just as important, the number here of people posting regularly is so comparatively small, and the posts of those who do even more sparse, than at the height of the blogging movement back in the oughts. So I've been spared the drama of finding out that someone unfriended me, often without telling me, and at least sometimes without my even knowing why. On one day about a decade ago, I got a simultaneous boot from two LJ friends who both were equally offended by a userpic I put up. I missed them; one was one of my earliest friends here, the other became even closer friends with the first after I introduced them to each other. But if they were going to take offense to a fucking picture, I had better things to do than grovel back into their good graces. One of them continues to post regularly to this day (all of them friendslocked), the other doesn't have one here and purged the old LJ account. I've somehow managed to live without them. Others, who I do maintain connections with, deleted me over one stray remark or another, but I reached out, discussed what it was, and we lived, learned and got over it. As friends do.
Not that I miss any of this bullshit, but if I ever did, it's alive and well on the universal center of bullshit known as Facebook.
----
I use an addon called FB Purity on my Facebook account. It lets you see more of the entries you want and fewer of the distractions you don't want. It also includes a feature that periodically scans your current list of Friends and notifies you if one of them is no longer in social communion with you.
More often than not, it pops up when someone deactivates their account. I've got close to a half dozen friends still showing as in this Facebook purgartory- who just got sick of the data gathering and time wasting and who knows what else, but who kept their basic existence alive while they take a "Facebreak" of weeks, months or forevers. You can delete them if you want, but otherwise when and if they come back, your friendship picks up where it left off.
Other times, it's just a matter of trial and error. I've had people from musical connections, and poets, and people from past home towns, add me and then subtract me a few weeks later. That's cool; not everyone wants my endless puns, bad fucking language, and rants about sportsball teams. Most of these people, I've met no more than once or twice, if at all.
But the name that popped up last night surprised me. It's someone I've met numerous times, attended multiple sporting events with (along with other family members), bought and sold tickets and other minor merch with, and even been out to dinner with when a family member was in Rochester for an event. We have dozens of mutual friends. What caused this sudden turn?
I actually worry about shit like this. There hadn't been any direct exchanges in days or even weeks, though I did leave a comment on a mutual friend's post they were tagged in. After wondering all night about it, I reached out this morning along these lines:
I hate non-apology apologies where people say "sorry if you were offended by something," but in this case I have no idea what I said that was offensive, so I guess I'll have to go with that.
It brought a quick enough reply: I wasn't offended, but your comments are often off topic and derail the discussions. Sure enough, my stray comment on the mutual friend's post was the one that led to it. I thought (not particularly) long and (not particularly) hard before I decided to take the high road and said I'd try to be less scattershot in responding to posts that might have this effect. For now, we've made up and are friends again, but it was still a distraction I didn't need going into what is likely to be a short but busy week.
And so, kids, the moral of the story:
If I ever cause you concern, grief, pain or anything bad on account of something I said, didn't say, did or didn't do? Tell me. I think most people would want the same, rather than just finding out they've been kicked aside on account of it. I'm reminded of something once heard from a college professor I once knew, which I quote often:
Words are a clumsy way of talking.
Eleanor and I have at least one experience a week where that proves to be true. And online forms make it worse: text doesn't convey tone, and emojis only go so far to compensate. The lack of immediacy in response can lead to causes and effects being forgotten, which can lead to simple misunderstandings being harder to understand and forgive.
I tend not to drop the banhammer on people, other than Trumpernutters and TERFs, but I can passively ignore as well as the next person. That said, a friend's a friend, and if you're reading this and I know who you are, if there's something I can help with, I will do everything reasonably feasible to do so, no matter how far or how tenuous the "real life" connection is.
Cutting off me (or a loved one) will make it much less likely that will happen, though. This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1679723.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
Back in LJ days, when I had dozens of friends of varying real-life connectedness posting (including my wife, child and eldest niece at various times), there was a lot more back and forth and a lot of words being exchanged that could easily be misunderstood. The message you'd get if you got into one of those misunderstandings was blunt and harsh:
so_and_so removed you from their friendslist.
I don't know if Dreamwidth, my current hosting site, even has such a thing, and I can't recall ever getting such a notice. For one thing, this site doesn't describe your fellow bloggers as "friends;" you "subscribe" and "grant access" to each other. Just as important, the number here of people posting regularly is so comparatively small, and the posts of those who do even more sparse, than at the height of the blogging movement back in the oughts. So I've been spared the drama of finding out that someone unfriended me, often without telling me, and at least sometimes without my even knowing why. On one day about a decade ago, I got a simultaneous boot from two LJ friends who both were equally offended by a userpic I put up. I missed them; one was one of my earliest friends here, the other became even closer friends with the first after I introduced them to each other. But if they were going to take offense to a fucking picture, I had better things to do than grovel back into their good graces. One of them continues to post regularly to this day (all of them friendslocked), the other doesn't have one here and purged the old LJ account. I've somehow managed to live without them. Others, who I do maintain connections with, deleted me over one stray remark or another, but I reached out, discussed what it was, and we lived, learned and got over it. As friends do.
Not that I miss any of this bullshit, but if I ever did, it's alive and well on the universal center of bullshit known as Facebook.
----
I use an addon called FB Purity on my Facebook account. It lets you see more of the entries you want and fewer of the distractions you don't want. It also includes a feature that periodically scans your current list of Friends and notifies you if one of them is no longer in social communion with you.
More often than not, it pops up when someone deactivates their account. I've got close to a half dozen friends still showing as in this Facebook purgartory- who just got sick of the data gathering and time wasting and who knows what else, but who kept their basic existence alive while they take a "Facebreak" of weeks, months or forevers. You can delete them if you want, but otherwise when and if they come back, your friendship picks up where it left off.
Other times, it's just a matter of trial and error. I've had people from musical connections, and poets, and people from past home towns, add me and then subtract me a few weeks later. That's cool; not everyone wants my endless puns, bad fucking language, and rants about sportsball teams. Most of these people, I've met no more than once or twice, if at all.
But the name that popped up last night surprised me. It's someone I've met numerous times, attended multiple sporting events with (along with other family members), bought and sold tickets and other minor merch with, and even been out to dinner with when a family member was in Rochester for an event. We have dozens of mutual friends. What caused this sudden turn?
I actually worry about shit like this. There hadn't been any direct exchanges in days or even weeks, though I did leave a comment on a mutual friend's post they were tagged in. After wondering all night about it, I reached out this morning along these lines:
I hate non-apology apologies where people say "sorry if you were offended by something," but in this case I have no idea what I said that was offensive, so I guess I'll have to go with that.
It brought a quick enough reply: I wasn't offended, but your comments are often off topic and derail the discussions. Sure enough, my stray comment on the mutual friend's post was the one that led to it. I thought (not particularly) long and (not particularly) hard before I decided to take the high road and said I'd try to be less scattershot in responding to posts that might have this effect. For now, we've made up and are friends again, but it was still a distraction I didn't need going into what is likely to be a short but busy week.
And so, kids, the moral of the story:
If I ever cause you concern, grief, pain or anything bad on account of something I said, didn't say, did or didn't do? Tell me. I think most people would want the same, rather than just finding out they've been kicked aside on account of it. I'm reminded of something once heard from a college professor I once knew, which I quote often:
Words are a clumsy way of talking.
Eleanor and I have at least one experience a week where that proves to be true. And online forms make it worse: text doesn't convey tone, and emojis only go so far to compensate. The lack of immediacy in response can lead to causes and effects being forgotten, which can lead to simple misunderstandings being harder to understand and forgive.
I tend not to drop the banhammer on people, other than Trumpernutters and TERFs, but I can passively ignore as well as the next person. That said, a friend's a friend, and if you're reading this and I know who you are, if there's something I can help with, I will do everything reasonably feasible to do so, no matter how far or how tenuous the "real life" connection is.
Cutting off me (or a loved one) will make it much less likely that will happen, though. This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1679723.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.