Jimmy Kimmel is my hero.
But not my friend.
Kimmel, the late night (at least by Victoria standards, which is anything that comes on after Jeopardy) talk show host, has declared this Wednesday to be National Unfriend Day. He wants us to go through our Facebook accounts and delete those contacts that are, well, just contacts.
"NUD is the international day when all Facebook users shall protect the sacred nature of friendship by cutting out any 'friend fat' on their pages occupied by people who are not truly their friends," Kimmel said on his website.
"If you wouldn't loan someone $50, unfriend them. If you wouldn't invite them to your birthday party, unfriend them. If you wouldn't cry if they got hit by a bus, unfriend them.
"You want to know who your friends are? Post a status update that says 'I'm moving and I need help.' The people who respond? Those are your friends.
Everyone else isn't."
Or to take it one step farther (and to plagiarize someone unknown) a friend will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body.
While I readily admit being a social-networking Luddite (I have a Twitter account but have never used it, something like the gym membership I bought in Regina in 1986) this is not an anti-Facebook thing. The six-year-old social networking site is a marvelous communication tool.
Indeed, Facebook rolled out a new messaging service Monday, one that it promises will turn e-mail into a relic. The Queen's Facebook page, launched last week, already has a quarter million followers. The Australian Psychological Society just reported that rather than replacing face-to-face contact, Facebook actually increases participation in real-life social gatherings. If all went to plan, I was to have gone to the pub last night for a beer (it's OK, Rich Coleman says so) with long-lost friends with whom I had reconnected through Facebook.
About 550 million people - roughly one in every 12 Earthlings - have Facebook accounts. The problem is that 499 million of them, including co-workers, salesmen, politicians and barely remembered schoolmates/cellmates, want to be your "friend."
That clashes with reality. Robbie Woliver, writing for Psychology Today, cites Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that people can maintain stable social relationships with a maximum of maybe 150 friends:
"Dunbar says you have a core of about five, then another 10 close ones beyond that, and then the outer circle is 35, complemented by about another 100 who have some sort of 'obligation of friendship.'"
This creates a social minefield. To accept all Facebook invitations means allowing the world access to your personal life, to bits of yourself that only your inner circle are meant to see. (Though by now you should know that Facebook is a sieve, that you would be nuts to post anything that you don't want your mother/spouse/prospective employer to see.
You know what they say: What happens in Vegas, stays on the Internet.)
But to reject a friend request is to risk resentment. Hell hath no fury like a Facebook stalker scorned. This holds doubly true when you go the extra mile and actively unfriend someone (BTW, the New Oxford American Dictionary made "unfriend" its Word of the Year for 2009, LOL, OMG, WTF, or something like that).
As a result, you put up with the annoying prattling of those who feel compelled to divulge the minutiae of their lives to quasi-strangers. (No one cares if you had bacon for breakfast, unless you're a rabbi. No one cares if your relationship status is "it's complicated" unless you're the Pope.)
What's worse is when these same people open doors of intimacy you don't want to enter; I once squirmed in fascination/embarrassment as someone I knew only professionally documented the entire arc of a messy break-up. OK, you can "hide" these friends, but that doesn't mean they're hiding you; you just forget that they're peeking through your window.
Anyway, thank you Jimmy Kimmel. You're no friend of mine.
