The digital hall of mirrors

The other morning I discovered that I no longer had 590 Facebook friends. I had 589. As you can imagine, I was devastated. Who had unfriended me? And why? What dreadful thing had I done to prompt such a drastic move? My thoughts circled through a range of possible explanations. Had somebody deleted their profile? Cleaned up their friends list, eliminating people they’d never actually met? Or was this a more personal, targeted act?

It’s possible that I am overanalysing this.

Thanks to social media, life has been complicated in ways that would have been unimaginable until very recently. Who unfriends whom, who gets unfollowed: it’s astonishing how much people care about these things. We care because these have become ways in which we might seek affirmation, or exact punishment or revenge — and even if this isn’t true, even if the reasons are perfectly practical and boring, chances are that others will attribute these motives to us anyway.

Either way, we’re screwed.

Social media is a recipe for trouble because it makes relationships visible. What in the past might have been known without necessarily being explicitly stated is now perfectly obvious to anybody who looks (or stalks, depending on your particular stance on the issue of semantics). It is this particular kind of visibility that presents us with problems, because when we know that others can see what we see — and they know that we know that they know — we become self-aware in ways that can end up as a sort of epistemological hall of mirrors.

(“Epistemological” is one of my favourite words. Try saying it after a couple of beers.)

Everything from weddings to political rallies and mass media brand launches is driven by the need for this kind of common knowledge but forums like Facebook have made everything so relentlessly public. To state something openly is to require others to acknowledge it too — somewhat like the celebrity everybody knows is gay, but has never actually officially stepped out of the closet and sold the story to Huisgenoot.

So, what matters is visibility. My ex-husband and I, for example, are mutually invisible on Facebook. The friends we share can see all of our updates and know what is going on in our respective lives, but in this case I’m opting for blissful ignorance. Rather thoughtfully, Facebook offers a “hide” function for the banalities you find unbearable, but this does not apply to tagged photos or friends in common: that’s where you have no control over what is visible to you and what is not.

If you don’t want to see somebody at all — for example, should you not wish to be presented constantly with tagged photos of an ex-boyfriend looking irritatingly pleased with himself at some or other social gathering, thus reminding you of how happy he was after he dumped you — then hiding isn’t good enough. You have to unfriend them. If they don’t notice, fine — but if they do, you can assume that they will assume that you’ve severed social media ties in a tacit declaration of cold war, and if you ever run into them at the rotisserie chicken counter in your local Spar, things could get awkward.

Obviously, in an era where we have things like global warming and E.coli on our carrots to worry about, this is unbelievably important. Yes, we know that these things don’t matter at all — and yet they do. So it’s probably a good idea to remember that expression from an older, simpler era: what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over. Sometimes, it’s better to look away.