The other day I was met with the realisation that someone I considered a half-decent acquaintance had blocked me off Facebook.
At first, I was confused. I didn't know what I had done wrong. We hadn't had a fight. I didn't feel a particular amount for this person enough to have sassed them at any given time. We were just friends, if not friends then really pleasant acquaintances. Was he fed up with my postings? I'm pretty crazy on the internet. If he was, wouldn't it have been easier to just delete me instead? That's the more mature approach; difference of opinion, you-just-flood-my-news-feed-dude. A deletion is more 'no hard feelings', but blocking is aggressive. I plotted sending him a concerned text message but then realised I would come across like a crazy person.
Then, I was angry. I'm awesome on the internet. Hell, I'm a generally awesome person. I'm about two memoirs and a History channel documentary away from shitting glitter. He's just a kid that doesn't understand the intensity of my awesome. I momentarily became an egotistical social climber the likes of which surpassed even the most repugnant of fashionistas and nightclub attendees.
Don't cry for me though, Argentina, because mostly I was wondering this: Why am I taking these relatively meaningless Facebook interactions, such as someone's presence on my friends list, and letting them be in any way significant?
It's become insanely difficult for any one person to let things go now that we've all interwoven ourselves into social media. There's a small part of me - and you, and everyone - that holds a certain significance towards digital association. We acknowledge and communicate with our friends by liking and commenting on their statuses. We greet new people into our lives by requesting that we add them on Facebook. We shun the non-social media acclimated by burning them at the stake similar to those accused of witchcraft in the 15th century. Or alternatively just by raising a brow at them and asking what the hell they think they're doing not being online twenty four hours, seven days a week.
It's how we've built the medium. To represent individual connections, markers of affiliation - almost a kind of digitally-based emotional entrapment. Sever an online connection, and someone is bound to take it personally. It's frankly quite absurd.
My 21st birthday was full of people I hadn't spoken to in a while. Because connection and how someone makes me feel is infinitely more important to me than the frequency of my interactions. It was even a key point in my speech. Of course, there were a heap of people present which I spoke to every day! But not all. Some ongoing interactions fall flat or by the wayside. Some you fall out of contact with. Those people are still important to me, though. Those connections still remain. Mainly because I still get to see them on Facebook.
Social media allows us to "catch up" with people whom we don't see very often, but I don't have the time to meet up with one thousand people in a month. Do I even have one thousand people worth seeing at any given time? And if not, why on Earth was it so irritating to me that someone I barely spoke to, blocked me off Facebook, when if social media weren't around I would give them about as much heed and attention as I give the creepy talkative Asian dude with the stringy black combover, who sells me my cigarettes?
Could social media be conditioning us to hold tiny, insignificant connections towards every person in our lives, old or new, at the risk of even the briefest emotional distress when we realise we've been booted? Are the vast multitude of interweaving connections we create causing our real relationships to stagnate and become heinously superficial? Is this just how we keep score?
I've got friends, and I've got Facebook friends. Sometimes the two get a little bit muddled. We're flooded with faces and stimuli on a day to day basis, each individual utilising the service for the same purpose - to interact with one another. It's the proverbial friendship bracelet of our time. It's no wonder we're so damn on edge about this shit.
Really, if you want to refute this entire culture, then you could just delete your Facebook. But that's insanely difficult, and oftentimes a bad idea - because social media is where the people are. It's how I engage my coworkers. It's how I engage my friends when they're not in my face. It's how we organise ourselves. It's how gay men for years have organised casual sex encounters. It's how we keep track of one another and stay in tune with the world around us from the comfort of our bedrooms. Anyone who claims they could live an ordinary life without social media, with no struggles or concerns, is lying straight to your face. Or living in a solitary meth den way out west, intentionally distant from humankind. We've built a world around convenience, and it comes at a cost.
The next time someone deletes me or blocks me off of social media, I'm going to not-care. I'm going to actively cackle to myself and dismiss the notion that this has any significance whatsoever. Because after all, it's just Facebook.
Or is it?
