Right Up My Ali

When I first moved to Baltimore I met someone at a bar and the first thing he asked me was how many facebook friends I had.  I didn’t know at the time so I had to look at my blackberry and told him it was 825.  He laughed at me and told me I wasn’t anyone until I hit 1,000.  This was in January of ‘09.  Things were different then.  I had just moved to a new city and started a new job.  I was vulnerable and naive and thought he was right, I was no one until I hit 1,000 friends.  I did everything I could to add people, and using the “people you may know” function was a daily activity.  Things got out of hand when I realized it takes three months to friend 100 people (that you know).  I also started to feel the pain as my newsfeed was flooded with  “Susie _____ really can’t wait for girls night and the season premiere of  The Hills!!!” or “Roy _____ switched my motto, instead of saying ‘F*ck tomorrow’ That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto.  Getting real weird tonight.”

A quick fix was to “hide” people from my newsfeed so they never show up but that didn’t work because I still knew that these people I don’t really know/care about were still “buddies”.  That’s when the defriending started.  I was working in the opposite direction I was headed less than a year ago and it was very liberating.

I forgot about this for a while since the mass genocide of FB friends was starting to prove tedious (I got tired after last names that begin with H) until I read this article in NYmag; “Facebook Doesn’t Care If you ‘Defriend’ or ‘Unfriend’” :

“When the good folks at the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” its word of the year earlier this week, they likely had no idea they’d initiated the fiercest lexicographical debate since the Great McJob Controversy of 2003. That’s because many people — including everyone at Daily Intel — had been using the term “defriend” to refer to the act of removing one’s friend on Facebook. As proponents argued their cases on message boards across the Internet, Oxford University Press weighed in. “Unfriend was chosen because it’s much more common than defriend,” a publicist told ABC News.”

I disagree wholeheartedly and will continue to use the word “defriend”.  I will also start to use it in real life.  So don’t cross me folks or I might just have to defriend you.