Culling Season

I've been traveling a lot and writing in my journal, and not keeping up with this blog, which was supposed to be for the deeper, more theme-oriented aspects of my life.  To be honest, my life right now is pretty a-ok, aside from the house-shaped elephant in the room that I don't want to think or talk about at the moment.  And the environment.  And the state of the U.S.  What I want to talk about in a short post, is Facebook.

There is no freaking way I'm going to get off of social media, because I love reading my FB wall and hear about what people are doing in Perth or Hai Phong or Amsterdam, Texas, Willow Glen, etc.  Facebook serves an important connecting purpose for me and these people.  I actually have a sense of what's going on in Vietnam during the months I'm in the US (right now, a shitload of weddings), and I get to see my friends' kids grow, and learn when people from high school die of seizure seizure stroke heart attack.  It's a lucky window into worlds I don't really live in, and it doesn't affect my bank account.

If you're reading this, you also know that I'm an overposter.  Not as bad as some, for real, but I really interact on FB.  I've never wanted to be a spectator in any aspect of my life, so I'm always piping up.  The interactions I've had with people there have really enriched my days and nights.  So much of adulthood is doing things you'd rather not do, and having my friends in my pocket--even if it's just a simulacrum of friendship--sometimes just makes it easier to Do the Things.  Anyway.

The Facebook friend list started getting carried away.  I've had an account since the girls were born in 2008, and over time, like you I bet, I became friends with literally every human I have ever come across in 50 years.  And their moms.  Great, good, bad and ugly.  Ambivalent people.  The voyeurs (or maybe that's just a nightmare).  People I aspire to be.  People who should just let it go.  The dead.  Everyone.

At first, it seemed like a beautiful garden of wildflowers.  In a terrarium.   At the edges I could Block and Lock.   Within this world--I felt, anyway--the invisible hand of goodwill would gently nudge and nourish us....

That was cool for a long time.  I found old friends and repaired old wounds and reshaped my history such that I could sit on it like a big ole Buddha.   The first problem came when members of my immediate family and I had a major--super major--falling out, and I realized that perhaps some aspects of my--of our:  Jeff was in the middle of it--life were a little too available.  Suddenly, I didn't want every-everyone to know every-everything.  I blocked two people whom I'd never imagined I'd block.   People who were second and third on my speed-dial list. 

It was a therapeutic move meant to create a boundary where there had been none, and it worked very well.   You risk something when you post; even if it's tiny, it adds up.  It had real consequences for me in real life: I felt safer, and in that safety, I grew towards and into something different.  That was five years ago. 

And then the opposite happened.  Today I have plateau-ed at almost 800 friends, but only about 145 of them regularly interact with me.   Until recently, I didn't think very hard about this ratio.  Then I did.  It feels significant but I'm not sure why.  I'm going to try to write through it here:

When 82% of your FB friends never interact with you, is that a bad thing?  It seems like it should be, because the default identity on the platform is "totally present," even if there are varying degrees of commitment.  Whether your friend has vacated their page and doesn't see anyone anymore, checks it sporadically but never posts, stalks their friends, or just dislikes you, you don't know.  How much, if any, affect you're having on them is impossible to determine.  If they teeming with hatred, desperately in love with your profile, or are cheerfully or depressedly ambivalent about you, you don't know.  Just when I think that x could give a rat's ass about me, she replies to a post about music.  When I tag someone I love and they don't respond, even weeks later, I'm sad.

(Perhaps there should be a person-shaped icon next to each person's name, with the percentage of their total social media interaction indicated by a color?  And another with the percentage of their interaction with YOU?  I am so fucking OCD.)

Let's just say that it's hard to gauge what kind of impact I'm having on FB, outside of my beloved 18%.  When I realized how large the non-interactive group was (four times larger!), I felt embarrassed that I hadn't caught it sooner, that my exhibitionist ego had been operating in "who cares-ville" for too long.  It's weird to confront paradoxical feelings:  I was embarrassed for my own blabbery, but also annoyed at the way people can ghost/coast on social media.  You can learn a lot about people without talking to them at all.  And I can go forever talking into a void. 

I used to think that the trick to being FB friends with relatives, students and people from a different political hellscape was not to prune your words into diplomatically palatable bits, but to remain whole and alert and reach out with all of the people in your mind's eye.  For better or worse, this has been pretty easy for me, but it's also allowed me to lump all 800 people into one giant Friend that I talk to.  Learning that your Friend is 80% brain dead is fucking disturbing.  Also, realizing that the impact of the 18% who interact with you has been diluted by the rest (death to lurkers!) is infuriating.

Anyhoo, TL;DR: I shortened my friend list through muting.  So far, the world hasn't stopped spinning.  We're still destroying the planet, and really bad people are getting filthy rich in full view of the rest of us.  Next will be reckoning with the people I enjoy reading about, but never interact with, myself!  And there's always the IRL version of FB, the most important garden to tend.