Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (10 page)

I still count only five or six people as my closest, most dear,
best
friends and do not define them as such because of how frequently I speak to them or how many photos of them are posted on my Facebook wall. I know they are my friends because I call them when I’m upset; I can trust them and be sure that they’ll keep my secrets; if they were in trouble, I would drop everything to find them and help them. Trust is the operative word and that quality truly separates my real friends and the “friends” I have online.

Every once in a while, one of my Facebook “friends” will try to start a chat with me. My real-life friends get in touch with me over text or e-mail, or they may even call if they’re feeling really ambitious, so I’m not sure why I keep my Facebook chat on. Maybe for curiosity’s sake. The people who contact me on Facebook chat fall into two categories. They are either
Top Model
fans I accepted right after the show was aired or my mom’s friends (you know the kind, the ones who are
always
on Facebook posting chain letters and long sob stories and stalking their daughters). As for the MTV and
Top Model
fans who contact me through Facebook, the thing is—and perhaps there is no way of saying the following without sounding obnoxious, so please bear with me—I was constantly amazed by the illusion (or delusion) of connectedness that these (almost)
strangers felt toward me. They believed that the mere acceptance of a friend request was the first step in our budding friendship—and I suppose that is exactly what I encouraged when I accepted them. By clicking “confirm” I basically said, “Yes, we are friends, go for it, contact me. Do what
friends
do.” I acknowledge I was complicit in making them feel they could write me notes like “Hey top model!!! Your dinner looked great last night. Will you cook for me sometime? Ps you were my favorite. I was rooting for u!”

In his book
Virtually You
, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude discusses the danger of losing our sense of privacy.
“With so much of our facts readily available online for anyone to consult,” he says, “control over our personal business has become a chimerical goal. This can threaten our self-possession . . . The small zone of privacy that we all need and that is crucial to our psychological equilibrium is nowhere to be found.” Without a second thought, I had blindly and willingly accepted so many people into my virtual circle of friends that people I didn’t know existed ended up knowing all this stuff about me. I had been careless with my privacy. Uh-oh. I had welcomed strangers into my dinners, friendships, and even birthday parties! I remember being inundated with Facebook messages on my last birthday. People whose Facebook profiles stated they currently lived in Oman or Bangladesh or the Netherlands were asking me the address of my birthday party (they wanted to stop by, of course!) and others were sending me strange little emoticons of cakes and candles on my profile. Over the last couple of years, the cake emoticons started appearing on my page when I uploaded
a photo of my mom or dad on their birthdays. (One stranger wrote, “Happy birthday to your parents Kimmy! I’d love to meet them one day!” What?
What?
)

One study completed at Western Illinois University demonstrated that the number of friends we have indicates how narcissistic we are, that our “drive for attention” is behind our need to seek a wider and wider audience. Some people friend more people just to feel as though they are part of a larger circle. Maybe they didn’t get enough love and attention in their formative years.

The fact is it’s impossible to sustain hundreds of friendships. British evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studies friendships formed through the Internet, argues that
humans cannot process more than 150 friendships at any given point in their lives. He actually says our brains may not be big enough to handle them. Once we surpass this number—which is called Dunbar’s Number—some people start falling by the wayside. Perhaps human beings are simply not wired to exist in the Facebook construct.

Our Facebook news feeds can’t tell the difference between our actual friends and those we have randomly confirmed—or felt obligated to confirm. Posts from faux friends clog our feed, while those from the most significant people in our real lives are shuffled along with the rest, flattening the friendship landscape until strangers and steadfast pals are given democratic treatment. Everyone’s just a JPEG to be clicked and expanded on or shrunk, confirmed or ignored. Of course, in recent years, Facebook has added the option of hiding people from news feeds so that we can
stop seeing posts from the people we truly don’t want to know about (or for me, people who post too many kitten photos, even if they are my best friends in real life). The issue with this new function, however, is that when you’re already friends with seven hundred too many people on Facebook, it’s nearly impossible to go through and hide all the right feeds. Plus, as social media addicts, we are also secretly worried that if we hide too much, we will
miss
something. The whole thing is so exhausting. Which brings us back to the point that we probably shouldn’t be accepting people as “friends” if we don’t want to know anything about them!

A few years ago, I missed a close friend’s birthday party because she sent the invite on Facebook. It had arrived with sixteen other invitations—to comedy shows with terrible titles (one was called
Doogie and Doggie
—why must people do these things?), birthday spectaculars for people I’d never heard of, invitations to like people’s new books or plays or films or new jobs (I don’t understand inviting someone to “like” a new job), a gallery opening for unappetizing drawings of people eating—and assuming they were all from people I didn’t know, I insta-deleted all of them.

I also missed my friend’s postings about the party because my feed was saturated with random strangers’ enlightening status updates, like “At Bloomingdales :) Happy . . . I love spending money that’s not mine :) thanx mom” (
Who was this person?
); relationship notifications from the oversexed and overinvolved; and general complaints and comments, like “classic L.A. problem: drive to dinner and then direct
to the bar? Or drive to dinner, drive home, drop off the car and cab it to the bar?” (
We get it. You’re going out tonight. Good for you.
) My Facebook feed is cluttered with too much information that is not improving my life in any way. The mundane and/or blatantly self-promotional posts make me angry—especially when I miss notices that would have been valuable to my
real
life. These posts are boring and useless time-sucks that are preventing me from really connecting with the people I actually know and want to stay connected with. The other day, a friend of mine wrote me an angry text about not congratulating her on a new job she’d posted about on Facebook. I hadn’t seen it, but this is the problem: even though we are all inundated with constant information from hundreds of people, we also hold each other up to the expectation that our friends will all see and react to everything we post. And the worst part is that all the promotional and fluff posts make me angry at myself too, because I could think of countless posts and uploads of my own advertising my restaurant, or an article I was in, or even this book. It makes me embarrassed of myself, though I know the feeling won’t stop me from posting and self-promoting in the future.

As our online social circles expand, I am often baffled by what some of my online friends share; their status updates make me wonder how they could be so open to people they don’t really know—and whether they believe they really know every person in their friend list. A few months ago, one of my friends’ grandfather died. Before she even had a chance to tell her friends about it over text or on the phone,
she had posted the news on Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. (Though at least she didn’t check into her grand-father’s funeral—I was not planning on admitting this, but I definitely checked into the funeral home. Sigh.) She also updated her status on Facebook with something like “RIP, Grandpa. We’ll miss you!” I was really surprised that she posted such delicate news in such an informal manner to her twelve hundred friends—at least 20 percent of whom she most likely didn’t know or rarely spoke to. I wasn’t sure if I should comment on such a serious, sad post. (I think I’d be appalled if I died and someone just commented on the status update. They might as well just “like” it.) The news of her grandfather’s death became just a blip on the screen. In a way, it lessened the significance of his passing, and I wondered how many people registered it compassionately with the seriousness it deserved.

That I found out about her grandfather’s death through my Facebook feed also clarified that we were no longer that close. Other friends have commented that they know they are no longer “really friends” with people when they learn about an engagement or pregnancy—or any significant life event—from Facebook or social media. Today, e-mails and texts are considered more intimate. Dr. Wicker explains that “relationships are built upon layers of trust. Blasting out personal information does not build trust or increase intimacy. It just blasts out information.”

Maybe it’s wrong and insensitive of me to judge my friend in her time of grief. After all, each person reacts in her own way and has the right to share news however she
pleases—and yet I couldn’t help but think that my friend’s hashtagged cries for help were more about getting the attention of as many people as possible at one time, sort of like texting a mass booty call (yes, I just compared her grand-father’s death to a booty call). Each of her posts reminded me of the teary overshares reality stars spit out whenever they are desperate for more screen time. I couldn’t figure out whether she was feeling actual sadness or grief. Maybe she just needed and wanted the attention and didn’t care if the people reading her post were friends or not as long it was read. But then I realized that I wasn’t so different from her. None of us with twelve hundred friends on Facebook are. When my cycle of
America’s Next Top Model
was airing, I accepted almost every Facebook friend request that came my way. I wanted the exposure because that is what my life was about then. And when I blogged for the
Huffington Post
or did segments on
MTV News
, I was happy that I could blast out and publicize my work. My restaurant shared its events on Facebook and I am happy to post them myself as well. I may not be trying to get “attention” in the same way that my friend was with her grandpa death tweets, but I certainly am trying to get business and exposure. I’m sure many of you who are reading this have already seen Facebook messages and events, tweets, Instagrams, and Tumblrs from me trying to get you to buy this book (thank you, BTW). The problem, however, is that when we do strive to heighten our attention or exposure via Facebook, we tend to end up with hundreds of friends we don’t truly consider “friends” and our privacy and “real” friendships are at risk
of being compromised. Once again, I’m embarrassed by my need to self-promote online but not enough that I can or will stop myself: it’s too easy and I’m afraid I will miss out on an opportunity if I put on the brakes.

The wonderful and creepy thing about social media is that somebody is always out there (new friends and loved ones, new customers who will buy our crap) even if we don’t know who those somebodies are. We’ve entered a new realm, where people feel comfortable sharing
a lot
. We all have our own rules and inner monologues about what’s acceptable and what’s too much. Some are like me—hovering in the bubble of willful delusion that we know every one of our virtual friends. Others are like my friend who told everyone about her grandfather’s funeral because she wanted to feel the mass-level love. There are precious few like my ultra-discerning mom, whose “friends” are all really friends. But whatever strictures you apply to yourself, once you go online, you’re part of the oversharing club to some degree.

My friend Brenda told me a story about her friend Donna that mocked the attention-grabbing overshare club we’ve all joined. Donna was at an Apple Store, browsing through Facebook on one of their public computers. About thirty minutes after she left, she received a notification on her phone that her cousin and eleven other people had commented on her status. She also had nine missed calls on her phone. Texts are one thing but missed calls mean business. Donna thought to herself,
Nobody calls me anymore unless there’s something imminently important to discuss
. Donna signed on to Facebook on her phone in order
to see what the comments referred to, because she hadn’t updated her status in a few days. (I’m still not sure why Donna had even signed in to Facebook at the store when she could access it on her smartphone, but this is what we do.) Next to her name, the following status update stared back at her: “HIV test came back positive. Bummer.” In the twenty or so minutes that Donna had left her Facebook account open at the Apple Store, somebody played a practical joke on her by posting to each of her 822 friends that she was HIV-positive—and that she was ridiculous enough to tell everyone she knew via Facebook. I thought the most amusing (disturbing) part was that Donna’s cousin actually commented on this status and wrote, “OMG I’m so sorry! Let me know if there is anything I can do!” Apparently even an AIDS-related announcement didn’t merit a phone call. (Also, imagine “OMG” as a reaction?! Amazing.)

For many people there is
nothing strange at all
about posting such incredibly personal information on a website that immediately disseminates it to hundreds—or millions, depending on your privacy settings. When I first got Facebook in 2004, I was very cautious about what I posted. Wesleyan University, where I went to college, was one of the first schools to get Facebook. It was “the Facebook” then and it was reserved only for college kids. My first memories of Facebook involve being in Olin Library at Wesleyan. I had a crush on a girl named Emily and Emily loved the Facebook, so I decided I better become a pro at this new and exciting website. Our relationship started because I sent her a Facebook message. I watched her, across
Olin, log on to one of the computers about two hundred feet from me, read my message, and type a few words, and before I knew it, I had a friend request from her. The rest was history (until we broke up two years later). “The Facebook” was mainly for all of us to stalk our campus crushes and ascertain whether or not they were single. I think that is how almost all of us used it. No one was sending invitations or “liking” things. We wanted to know if we could date each other. And of course we liked looking at profile photos, but people weren’t really posting photos otherwise (there was no such thing as the mobile upload, so almost everything was done by computer). Gradually, though, the Facebook became Facebook, the world of users got exponentially larger, I got used to sharing information with my growing friend base, and then I started posting what I would have previously told only my closest friends. The attention I got from sharing my thoughts and the details of my life was exhilarating. I loved seeing people’s responses and feeling so connected to so many that I got addicted to updating my status and posting even more photos and links, just so more and more people would comment. It didn’t take long for me to stop thinking about the potential consequences—the fact that many people had access to the details of my private life or the fact that the ephemeral details of my life (some of which would embarrass my future self) would live forever online. Years later, a different girlfriend was perusing my account and found that very first Facebook message to Emily. She didn’t like its flirtatious tone even though it was four years later. We got into a fight. Perfect.