Last fall I had a voicemail from a former high school classmate, asking me to come to our 35th high school reunion. This was not someone I'd been close to, but I had attended schools with her from 5th grade-on. We were more than acquaintances. And I decided to respond to her via FB.
The upshot of this is that we "friended" each other. My mistake, mea culpa. Because if you have fewer than 50 FB friends (which is my case), you can't avoid knowing about every change and "thought" that they have and post to their page. And her posts started to annoy me, just as her behavior in high school had annoyed me. And I hated high school, partly because the preoccupations that still concern this classmate were the dominant HS culture. In fact, the only reason I had considered attending the reunion was mostly that I could spend time with my BFF and she and I could go, and then be bitchy about it later. (Or maybe forever.) And I'd shed my middle-age spread recently, so ... You know.
But why would I want to go to a reunion for an experience I detested? DOH. So I refused the invitation when it arrived via snail mail, and after a few more weeks, I un-friended the high school classmate.
Phew! It felt great! I was able to act on my real feelings. She wouldn't ever notice (I reasoned), because we aren't friends in real life, and she had so many FB pals that one less wouldn't make a difference.
Except: Two days ago, I got a friend request from my un-friended HS classmate. She was "confused," she said: weren't we friends? For about five minutes I hesitated. What would it cost me to FB-friend her again? Principles instilled in me about good manners and politeness said I should accept her request and gracefully make up an excuse —that is, LIE —about inadvertently un-friending her I don't know how that happened oh my isn't that weird thank goodness you caught it of course we're friends ...
But we're not. And I don't want to be. Because "friend" as denoted by FB terminology has little meaning, doesn't mean I have to compromise my personal definition of the word. So I choose to accept as friends those people who are actual, true friends whom I communicate with in Real Life, not those people who I would never, ever, spend time with nor seek out to be friends with if I had met them for the first time only last week.
So I ignored the request, because my only FB choices were accept, ignore, or report for abuse. (The last choice, of course, doesn't apply to this situation.) I'd prefer to send a "No, thanks, not interested" response. Wouldn't that be the truly ethical way to respond to people's requests that you don't wish to accept, rather than ignoring them? ... which is a coward's way out. I don't like being a coward. It doesn't feel ethical.
I tried, for a long time, to only FB friend people I would actually want to talk to for more than an hour in real life. High school wasn't that long ago for me, but I don't remember most of my classmates so I'm not particularly interested in stalking them. And yet, many of them attempted to friend me more than once, with "confusion" akin to that of your classmate's. So now I have more than 200 "friends."
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to read your journalism what-not, oh grammar policewoman of my childhood!