Online people are real people, too
Image by Gauldo via Flickr
A while ago, on an otherwise unexciting morning, I decided to exercise a cull. I started deleting people from my Facebook ‘friends’ list. Those who were dispensed with were people who I hadn’t spoken to in ages, or who I didn’t really know that well – the odd acquaintance who had, at the time, seemed like a logical addition. To them, I am sorry. As it turns out, they’re real people.
From CNN:
Online rejection also doesn’t lessen the physical reaction we have to emotional pain.
“Pain is divided into two components,” said Baldwin Way, a UCLA researcher who studies the way human brains respond to social rejection.
“If you put a red-hot poker on your arm, one part of your brain says, ‘This pain is on your arm,’ and the other part says, ‘Ow, that hurts’ and is less concerned with where it is and more concerned about the emotional meaning of it,” he said. “That [second] part also seems to be activated when someone’s left out or excluded and rejected.”
To Way’s surprise, that neurological reaction holds true even when the rejection comes in a digital form, lacking the real-world body language, vocal intonations and other aspects that can influence the way rejection is perceived and felt.
Surprise? Really?
Is it still news that people no longer separate Facebook from real life? Being surprised that someone might be offended when they’re rejected on a social media site is now about as archaic as wondering why your girlfriend is mad at you because you hung up on her during a telephone conversation. It’s not like you were really talking to her, right? It was just her “phone personality.”
I’ve been rejected and deleted by people on Facebook. And at first – briefly – I wondered why they did it. But it never occurred to me that the feeling of online rejection should be any different than a real-life one. After all, Facebook friendships are like real friendships. I was only mildly concerned after being rejected on the social media site because it was by relatively obscure acquaintances. Had I been deleted by a friend that I interacted with often in real life, it would have been a different story. And I can’t imagine many people of my generation (Gen-Y) feeling any different.
Online relationships follow the same rules as real life ones. The CNN story quoted above describes Elaine Fogel’s attempt to add an unknown woman to her LinkedIn account and her emotional stress after being rejected. But what did she expect? Requesting random friendships online is now akin to butting into a conversation at a party in order to give out your business card. It’s uncouth and boorish. The same rules apply to online decorum.
But, granted, there is room for a more nuanced method of rejection. It just hasn’t been invented yet.
The problem with online rejection is that it’s completely devoid of personality and annoyingly passive-aggressive. There is no way to express your feelings of guilt or regret while deleting someone from Facebook, and that hurts. The personal touch – the part that lets us know that “it’s not you, it’s me” – is missing. Deleting someone in the middle of an otherwise uneventful online relationship is like standing up in the middle of a date, shrugging your shoulders and saying, “sorry, asshole,” before walking out of the restaurant. It’s harsh.
So what does this all mean? Well, not much, apart from the fact that we ought to be careful with our online relationships. Just as we should teach our children (and each other) that our online identities are a reflection of ourselves in real life, we should remember that online personas are as easily damaged as real ones. But that also means that we should remember to make online friends the same way we make friends in real life: carefully.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
I appreciate your plea for civility.
This is tricky because…some of the people I’ve friended turn out to be booooooring, posting every insanely dull flicker of their eyelids. Yes, I can ignore them, but then what’s the point? I’ve also seen people exhibit behaviors or opinions there that you think “Hm, not sure I want to be your friend after all.” And, likely, vice versa.
I think the word “friend”, in this context, has become so debased as to have become somewhat meaningless. I guess “acquaintance” makes a clumsier verb.
I think I probably agree with you. We all have “friends” online that really, if pressed, we’d admit we don’t really like, but are too lazy to delete. But if they really cause you that much annoyance, I think you’re justified in just seeing them off with a click of a key. Why do you owe them more than that? While I still argue that online rejection is harsh, I don’t think it’s always unjustified. Cull! Delete! Just be prepared that people will be hurt, that’s all.
In response to another comment. See in context »Interesting discussion.Do you think those who are most invested in FB pr who use it the most are the ones who end up with hurt, de-friended feelings?
A recent study looked at romantic jealousy on FB and found “increased Facebook use significantly predicts Facebook-related jealousy … a feedback loop whereby using Facebook exposes people to often ambiguous information about their partner that they may not otherwise have access to and that this new information incites further Facebook use.” (http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2008.0263?journalCode=cpb)
In other words, people are responsible for their own hurt feelings and I agree with you, cull the heard!
Yes, most likely those who aren’t on Facebook would tend to invest less emotional weight to it, but that’s certainly not always the case. I’m sure there are people who find it to be an extension of the outside, clique-y world, so why bother taking part?
In response to another comment. See in context »Again, it depends on what the person is like in the real world, I think. I imagine most of the time people react to a de-friending the same way they would in real life. I think the distinction is negligible. The study you cite is interesting, but I’d imagine that those people were possibly already prone to that kind of behaviour – Facebook just offered a more public outlet for it.
This is why I was surprised that someone else was surprised that the separation between the two worlds is basically non-existent. I thought that was a given?
In my experience of college-era love dodecahedrons, I find that all Facebook drama is invariably an extension of “fleshworld” drama. I think this is something you can say about technology in general, that it adds layers to already existing humanesque things.
Of my few hundred bookface friends, plenty are people I could easily cull, but feel no reason to. I never know when we’ll bump into each other again and rekindle things. Social networking services are as much address books as virtual hang-outs. The people I cull are those I am viscerally disturbed by. Anything else seems like unnecessary bridge-burning.
Hi, Colin. Just as a point of clarification, the CNN reporter interviewed me as a result of my MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog post on LinkedIn rejection.
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/08/help_i_have_social_media_rejec.html
My post was meant to be tongue in cheek and I used it to engage in dialog with my readers. What resulted was a second blog post, several LinkedIn discussions and an e-book outlining the qualitative results.
I invited the woman in question after engaging in discussion with her in one of our shared community groups. I will disagree with your comment about it being akin to butting in at a party. When I attend in-person networking events, the purpose is to meet new people for mutual benefit. I believe that social networking gives us the same opportunity. It’s all in how we embrace and use it.
My view of Facebook is totally the opposite of yours. I regard it as a minor amusement and a promotional tool (though not a very effective one) for my writing and I’m a shameless Facebook whore. I have hundreds of FB friends, would like to have thousands, have no idea who most of them are, will friend anyone, anywhere and can’t imagine why I’d ever defriend anyone unless they turned out to be a Nazi war criminal. If anyone defriended me, I doubt if I’d even notice, let alone get upset about it. The idea that FB friends are or ought to be real friends (although of course there is some overlap) strikes me as odd or perhaps naive. But I guess everyone has developed their own idea of what FB is all about.
You can also remove people from your news feed, but not delete them outright, if you find their comments horribly annoying.
Personally, I have seen my friend number go up and down and I’m always curious about who is dumping me, or if they are … often it’s people getting off of Facebook completely; then when they get back on your number goes up again. Twitter drops I take more personally because I fear it means I’m actually boring!
I am extremely old-fashioned. A “friend” is someone I actually want to sit in the same room with, care about and want to spend time with — not just hear endless minutiae about their lives. A true friend, in my book, is the person you can call at 2: 00 a.m. from the ER. They’re rare.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tweets Tube and Peter Flatman, colin horgan. colin horgan said: Online people are real people, too: (via @trueslant): http://bit.ly/1hDHEB [...]
I think it depends on the person. In that way, its just like life.
If you’re someone who really connects with and cares about people, you’re probably going to be like that with your online friends as well as your in-person friends. Maybe more so during certain periods in your life, for instance if you’re living in a different area for a while, or just don’t have close in-person friends for a short time.
And if you’re the kind of person who treats friends indiscriminately in real life, you’re not going to be any better in online life, unless someone reaches you in a new way and changes you.
So it comes down to basic human dynamics — there are people who care and care deeply and emotionally get invested — who look for ways to bond with others and become closer. And there are those who (consciously or not) treat people like numbers, cards, or pawns in their lives, and by doing so put distance between them and others, whether online or in real life.