Trimming off the ‘Friend Flab’
Actress and singer Selena Gomez recently unfollowed everyone from one of her social networks. Far from being impulsive, this is actually called a ‘Friend Purge’. And here’s why people do it...
Most of us know someone who has done a mass unfriending for some reason or the other. It is different from a ‘digital detox’. In this case, you aren’t tired of the medium, but rather, of seeing the same bunch of people (or strangers) day in and day out and the stuff they post.
“A friend purge is almost like a master cleanse of one’s social network. Every once in a while when I go overboard with accepting ‘friend’ requests, I tend to give myself a good unfriending session... And get rid of contacts that make my timeline/ news feed toxic to even look at,” says Padmini Bhonsale, who works in a Human Resources firm. “A friend who had made some regrettable choices about who to follow on a microblogging site described logging on to her timeline like ‘walking into a room full of people who are all shouting random sentences at each other, with no connection whatsoever,” adds photographer Trisha Brooks. There are other annoyances too. “People seem to have genuinely lost the freaking plot when it comes to using hashtags” is what a fashion photographer recently put as his status update.
Some describe this purging as being easy as there’s no emotional angle to unfriending or unfollowing people who you’ve never met in real life. But is there really no emotional connection between you and your online ‘friends’? And can ‘less is more’ be better when it comes to one’s friend and follower count?
Two studies from the University of Colorado in Denver conducted this year, shed new light on the most common type of person to be unfriended and their emotional responses to it (See boxes). Apparently, those with “polarising comments, often about religion or politics” were found to be tiresome and would typically be the first to get the axe. “The other big reason for unfriending was frequent, uninteresting posts,” said a researcher who participated in the study.
So, and as earlier mentioned, it’s probably not people you dislike, but the stuff that they share/post/repost. Social networking websites use algorithms that combine variables such as what you ‘like’ and what others similarly find interesting. But this often goes wrong. A hilarious video on a video-sharing website might get almost a thousand up-votes, while a story about the missing Malaysian airline would not, even though the latter is news that concerns many nations and one of the most mysterious cases in recent times. This results in a timeline that gets cluttered with the cyber equivalent of junk food and truncated attention spans — you get stories that an algorithm thinks is interesting, as opposed to what is genuinely interesting.
Others are ambivalent. Such as hotelier Kush Kotwani, who says, “I consciously restrict my friend list to family and friends I know in real life. I am an infrequent user and so when I do log on, I am more amused than irritated by some of the things I see. Unfriending people can be mean, so I just choose to ignore.” Lastly, reasons for a ‘friend purge’ could also be none of the above. Perhaps it’s just ‘friend fatigue’ and we’d simply like to interact with a different bunch of people instead.
TOP TYPES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE THE FIRST TO BE UNFRIENDED ACCORDING TO THE STUDY:
1 High School friends
2 Random adds
3 Friend of a friend
4 Work friends
5 Common interest friend (when interests become divergent)
2 Random adds
3 Friend of a friend
4 Work friends
5 Common interest friend (when interests become divergent)
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