So I got unfriended on Facebook

And I’m perturbed, mainly because unfriending anyone online is a big deal. It really is. Facebook, you see, has changed the nature of friendship quite profoundly for those who have entered that apparently innocuous blue and white portal, garlanded with cheery suggestions of “You haven’t talked to her lately” and such anodyne prompts as “What’s on your mind?”.

There be dragons.

Facebook has forced us to formalise our connections with others, so that they are listed, categorised, and relentlessly, constantly updated. It’s a form of Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, constantly, simultaneously lived and living in real time. There is no casual cutting of ties, no allowing acquaintances to drift gently into the past. Instead, they are always there, their exploits and their photos, their all too often vapid self-regard and their Farmville herds constantly evolving before your eyes.

So when friendships end in the real world, they must end on Facebook too. Purging one’s friend list of people one has never met or would have trouble distinguishing from a bar of Protex Herbal is not the issue. But when you unfriend people you’ve actually met, the online realm takes on a new and awful significance. In the past, I’ve unfriended a couple of people with whom I’ve had disagreements or other awkward entanglements in the bricks and mortar world. They were deeply hurt, and I was forced to relent. They considered the unfriending a provocative gesture, and I had to make amends.

Because of all of this, it feels strange to be on the receiving end of an unfriending, especially as I thought I got on quite well with the individual in question. Granted, when we did meet it was a disaster, but hardly — I thought — enough to unfriend me.

Unfriending, in the context, is drastic. There’s no going back on an unfriending: it’s tantamount to a declaration of cold war. No matter that it is unlikely that we’ll never meet again, the fact of it will remain concrete and immovable, a marker of how it is not possible to be liked by half of the people one meets even a fraction of the time and that, for all our best intentions, a lot of the time our interaction with other human beings is an unmitigated cock-up.

Thus the virtual world complicates our lives even as it expands our horizons. As a result of the first unfriending, I had what one might describe as an exchange with another friend introduced to me by the first; consequently, I unfriended this person too, and more than that, adjusted my privacy settings so that they cannot find me. That’s not just unfriending: that’s a statement of intent never to have anything to do with that individual ever again. In the absence of personal contact, it’s the closest gesture we have to the middle finger.

So we use these digital proxies to express anger and betrayal, to declare our frustration that what we imagine is real connection with other souls must end, so often, in a crater and a plume of smoke. And there’s the rub in all of this: no matter how virtual our friendships become, the hurt they cause is still so very real.