A couple of weeks ago I had 131 Facebook friends. Today I have 128. This means, over that fortnight 3 people have decided that they no longer wish to be publicly linked with me. If I was a quasi-celebrity being spoken of unfavourably in the media (Kerry Katona), or been accused of doing something I shouldn’t (Chris Langham) this might be understandable. As it is, in two cases I am as peripheral to these people as the day they accepted my friend request. In the third, I actually met the person concerned for a beer this time last year following some Facebook emailing. It wasn’t a social occasion likely to rival my wedding in the annals (we’d not met in 8 years so it was a tad discomforting), but it was pleasant enough, and there was certainly no indication that it was an engagement of such dire proportions as to warrant my purging from their online world. One day I’ll be Prime Minister or the first man to walk on Mars and they’ll all come crawling back, at which point I’ll direct them to my proxy group where they can sit with all the other peons who don’t actually know me (a proxy group really is a measure you’ve made it these days isn’t it).
All this rather reminds me of the unpleasant aspects of school. Writing in The Guardian recently, David Mitchell (of Peep Show fame) mentioned that while he wasn’t the most popular guy in school he ‘got by’. This more or less reflects my own experience; a circle of friends large and strong enough that bullies and/or beautiful people generally picked on an easier target. However, there were odd occasions when I might be caught in the open or be more in need of a hairwash/cut/clearasil than a peer and as such was viewed as fair game. My confidence would naturally take a hit as a result, recover after about a week when some poor fool came in smelling a bit ‘funny’ and then, at some point, depending on how kind my skin or voice were to me, the process would begin again.
However, at school, I never had such a reliable, statistical device as Facebook to quantify exactly how many friends I had or chart their comings and goings (which is probably for the best). As such, there was no numerical measure of my declining popularity to depress me. I might have been aware that not letting Ben Barnard copy my French homework, probably didn’t endear me to him, but no tangible friend total diminished as a result. No, this is a uniquely adult angst.
It isn’t just the number of friends count that gives me reason to fret. I used to display an application whereby your friends rated you on things such as ‘best singer’, ‘best dressed’ and so forth, against another of their other friends at random, and you are allocated a rank based on how many times you ‘win’. I noticed that my ranking for ‘best looking’ was somewhat lower than might be expected and investigated further. I was horrified to discover that three of my so-called friends had been given the chance to rate me on this, and each time, had opted for the other person. This intelligence sent me into a spiral of insecurity and despair I’d not seen in a long time, and in a fit of pique I deleted the application. In doing so, I was warned of the implications for my friends if I deleted it. “Your friends will lose all votes you have cast so far” it told me. Fuck them, frankly.
Of course, I was overlooking any number of possible mitigating factors. I am married, therefore out of the equation, and so perhaps the other person won by default? Maybe all three voters were men, and the randomly allocated opponent was a woman. What if I was up against the partner of the person making the judgement? In short then, plenty of highly plausible reasons for my low rating. Thank goodness for that.
Eventually rational thought entered the equation, and I stopped worrying about all this nonsense, but it was a worrying decline into introspectiveness that I could have done without. Facebook seems to be made to fuel rejection (in addition to stalking, infidelity and defamation of course). Any friend request not answered within 24 hours leads to a furrowed brow and repeated logging in to Facebook. I have just installed a fictional country application and asked my mate Carl if he’d be my ally. He didn’t reply for at least 6 hours by which time I’d almost developed hypertension. Thank god he said yes or I’d have had to kill him…
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