The unfriending era

A friend has recently told me that she felt upset of being defriended from a colleague’s Facebook profile. She had a discussion with him and he, after a click, easily eliminated her name from his social media list.

Facebook does not send any notification when you unfriend somebody, leaving the members to find out later they have been defriended when they cannot access to someone’s profile. It can actually be a unpleasant experience considering that the same person either asked you for the “friendship” or accepted your request.

On the other hand, it is true that relationship can change, you could be annoyed by somebody who posts too many status updates or you want to limit your network to the closest people.

This new trend of cutting down people is more and more spread. The new Oxford American English even announced that the 2009 word of the year is “unfriend”, meaning “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site." In the ABC news I also found a debate on the usage of the verb “unfriend” or “defriend”.

Many online magazine and bloggers talk about the “defriending” process and some give you some advice (To De-Friend or Not to De-Friend); Cosmopolitan, for example, provides you “10 signs you should unfriend someone on Facebook”.

There is even a “Defriend Tracker”, an application that should show a list of the people who have defriended you on Facebook.

Regarding the unfriending trend, in the New York Times I found an article - “Friends until I delete you” - that mentions a particular adverting campaign run some months ago by Burger King, called “Whopper Sacrifice”. In few words, the global chain of fast food restaurants offered a free hamburger to anybody who could “sever the sacred bond with ten Facebook friends” (the New York Times). The “nicest part” was that Burger King was sending notifications to the unfriended people saying that they “were dropped for a free sandwich” (actually for a tenth of it!). It seems that more than 230,000 friends were damped. The fast food chain ended the program to fulfill Facebook’s policy.

Whopper Sacrifice is the first Facebook application I have known that, instead of creating connections (joining a group), asked you to decrease your network.

In my opinion this campaign was a success and a brilliant idea: being so bizarre it generated a lot of press coverage and it was so smart to take the advantage of a trendy process that has been arising all around the world. It basically provides you with an excuse to unfriend people! Even if it is not a nice feeling being unfriended for an hamburger, I think that people had fun with it and nobody was really offended. You could always re-friend them, maybe using some funny messages, like “Don’t worry I cannot eat anything else, I am full now”.

The unfriending era has just started.

The negative impact of internet and the social media on our life

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn are just some names of social media, where you can put your profile, opinion or comments on whatever you like and interact with others that can be friends, class mates or unknown people.

We have created even virtual world “Second Life” where you can create your digital alter-ego (avatar) and interact with other users of the program.

Only Facebook reports 350 million active users and 35 million people who update their status everyday (Facebook statistics).

With all these new media, the time spent on the web is keeping on increasing and more people are at risk of developing a Internet Addiction Disorder, meaning an excessive use of the web that impacts on daily life. This “disease” has not been recognized in the US but at the same time all around the world more and more centers have been developed to cure it (recently one in Rome, Italy at the Gemelli hospital, one in Fall City, Washington state, and some in China).

I was shocked to read in the Chicago Tribune that few months ago in China a teen ager was killed in a campus where he was recovered to cure his internet addiction (article). There was another young Chinese beaten some weeks later in another camp.

Those events spotted out the extreme methods some Chinese country-side centers use to wean children off the Internet that include electric shock and antidepressants. It is incredible that someone can “cure” such “simple” disease with these terrible methods even in the 21^st century.

I think it is very important to know and use the new media to interact with many different people, not only for networking but also to be always updated on what is going on around the world (blogs and Twitter can be faster ways to receive or release news). Moreover, the social media create new business opportunities and settings, for example with Facebook you can deliver information or ideas to a target that is already interested in you. New rules will be developed in communication disciplines like marketing, advertising and public relations.

We still have to find a good balance: the digital experience should not have the upper hand on the real life. We need to find gratification from ourselves mainly in the earth planet not in a virtual one.

Unfortunately, the spreading of I Phones and Blackberries making the web so accessible, increases the risk of developing “internet addiction”, that causes depression and even physical and psychological weakening.

My 84 year-old friend still doesn’t understand how I can have 130 friends in Facebook without knowing all of them and how everybody knew so fast I bought a new sofa. She still prefers reading newspapers everyday, watching the news on TV and hanging out with her few close friends.

Sometimes I wonder if her “slow pace”, no technological world is better than the fast and stressful digital one.