Unfriend

I was amused by Jimmy Kimmel's show on "National Unfriend Day", which was started three  years ago by the show to have people "unfriend" their "friends" on Facebook. Some enthusiastic audience did take videos explaining why they decided to unfriend some Facebook friends, and the reasons are so funny. Some Facebook posts are simply too boring to read. An example could be a lady who did a trip to Pittsburgh recently. Since she had that plan, her Facebook was updated every few hours with status such as "ready for Pittsburgh", "can't wait to go to Pittsburgh", and "packing for Pittsburgh", etc. Another example could be a guy who's keen of posting pictures of food and his feet - in different places and different times. Some Facebook posts may not be boring by themselves, but are too hard to understand. A girl decided to unfriend her classmate from Hungary because her Facebook posts were written in Hungarian. Anyway, Jimmy is likely to continue talking about unfriending until this Saturday.

Social media has largely changed our life styles. And the definition of "friend" has been evolved as well. "Friends" used to refer to people who we have personal connections and know each other well. For examples, we have friends from school who take the same courses or do the same workshop with us; or friends from some associations or clubs who share similar interests and hobbies. Now we even identify people as "friends" without even talking to them. This kind of people, which I tend to label as "virtual friends", exist extensively on Facebook and Twitter. We add them as friends usually because they're connected to someone we know, or belong to same network, but it has nothing to do with whether we're truly close to each other. Later we always find a big gap between us and these virtual friends, and never have the chance to talk to each other, but also to embarrassed to unfriend them since they haven't done anything wrong.

It's probably nice to know more people in the world, however it's not fun when you are overwhelmed by useless information. For example, what can you learn about a friend from her timely but meaningless updates about a Pittsburgh trip except that she's so boring/or so addicted to Facebook? What's worse, you have to spend time to filter information like this, which I think is all the campaign of "unfriend" is trying to address: forget about the bubble on social media, be realistic about social network, spend more time with friends in reality, and get involved in more meaningful relations.

Talk about reality, I don't think I will unfriend any people on Facebook this Saturday. Just like most Facebook users, I'd rather waste my time going through dumb posts than telling people your posts are terrible.