Posted by irisia in mom, social media.
Tags: bff, facebook, facebook friends, findin, finding old friends on Facebook, friend 'em and leave 'em, friending, refriending, unfriending
This is a follow-up to a previous post about friending and re-friending. The whole friending thing still seems so odd to me. In the past, if we wanted to be friends with someo
ne, we didn’t seal it with an agreement like accepting a friend invitation. There was no BFF moniker. But, if the deal did need to be sealed, I would have chosen to put several people in the acquaintance category – of which there isn’t on FaceBook. I would acquaintance them.
I’m in my um, eh, early 40′s. Facebook is 5 years old so it’s the tool for us older folk. This is the time of my mid life where people are becoming sentimental about re-connecting with old friends. I’m one of them too. But I continue to be perplexed about people requesting friend status that I knew in high school or college but was never really friends with. These are people like a friend of a friend or a friend’s sibling. Now I’m not considering my accepting a friend status as prestigious by any stretch of the imagination. But, I would say and post different things if I knew old high school acquaintances and friends of friends were seeing my updates.
So the question is friend them, not friend them, or possibly a new category – friend ‘em and leave ‘em. This sounds awfully cavalier and totally skum-of-the-earth but it is a possible strategy. Let’s face it. If someone who I don’t know very well requests friend status and I accept their friend request, then they probably won’t notice if I friend ‘em and leave ‘em. If I go back about a week later and unfriend them, they probably won’t know – unless they had very few friends in their friend basket because I’m certain they are not going to check to see if I am still a friend.
So altogether, this creation of a friending strategy is something I would never have dreamed of even 5 years ago. I’ve analyzed it way too much and I’ve even created a formula on my tree – which like this whole scenario deserves – MS Excel would tell me that my formula did not make sense or was some sort of circular reference. Now Excel strategies – that’s something I would be much more qualified to talk about!
Posted by irisia in mom, social media.
Tags: accepting facebook friend request, denying facebook friend request, don't want to be friends on facebook, facebook, facebook friended, facebook friends, facebook refriended, facebook unfriended, finding old friends on Facebook, friended, friending, how to not accept a facebook friend request., old friends find you on facebook, refriended, refriending, unfriended, unfriending
I do a bit of unfriending and to my knowledge I’ve only been unhappy about being unfriended one time. To the best of my knowledge, they don’t know when you unfriend them unless they look for your picture and it’s not there. The one time I was unfriended, I didn’t realize until I noticed her picture was missing from my friends list. In order to re-friend, she had to initiate the friending process again. So, you can sort of discretely unfriend but can’t discretely re-friend.
Old friends appear and send friend requests on FB. So, this can be great and it can be frustrating. I wonder if there are any social mores for this. Like, how well should you know somebody before you ask them to friend you? I like to have a personality for my Facebook which is that my friends on Facebook are the people that I want to keep updated with on a very regular basis. So when I get friend requests from people I haven’t seen in 20 years and didn’t miss – like very casual acquaintances from high school – I really don’t want to friend them on Facebook. Then, I feel badly because I don’t want to deny their request or not accept their request because it feels rude. So, how weird is this that after not seeing someone for 23 years, they send me a random message saying, hey why don’t we share pictures of our kids and stuff like that on a very regular basis? Well, no, I really don’t want to. So, then since I haven’t seen them for 23 years and they live in another state, is it really rude not to accept their friend request?
Then, there are those women who were catty in high school or college or the sorority and all of the sudden you get a Facebook invitation from them. So I think, they probably just want to show me how time has not aged them one bit and they look better than ever. So curiousity kills this cat and I go to their page and see what they look like. So, then I realize that my first assumption is not true. They have aged as gracefully or as not gracefully as I. Then I think they don’t have any sincere interest in friending me because we had only the desire to aquantance in high school or college so why would we friend now? So, I took the plunge and I just deleted these couple friend requests. But one person sent another. So, I accepted begrudgingly. Honestly, I wasn’t even an acquaintance of his. I knew his sister but not well enough to have even spent time with her. So, I accept it thinking I can unfriend him in a couple days and he probably won’t know. But why would I be a two-faced friender? Why don’t I just sincerely not friend him at this time?
Friending as a verb – how weird.
