Pinhole photo of a computer / Foto de um computador tirada com uma pinhole

EN/   Is Facebook your friend?

This year I questioned myself about the way we collect friends on Facebook, and what are the real importance of keeping them. From long time ago, I’ve always been the type that deletes people who I added because I met through a friend or colleague, but did not remain in my life. But now I took it to another level.

I began to question myself why I still had those classmates, I barely spoke at school, and had  acquaintances who only saw twice in his life and all of them I never really cared (and neither them) to stay in touch. So I started to “clean up” my friend’s list, passing through filters that I created, such as:

– Have I talked with this person over the past 5 years?
– Have I met that person in the last 3 years?
– How many times I met that person after we first met?
– Was s/he part of some important moment of my life / my childhood?
– Do we have common interests or am I against the ways that person thinks and acts?
– Do we maintain some kind of virtual contact (likes, comments), even if we do not talk a lot?

According to the answers I delete or keep the person on my list, it seems very simple but sometimes by external influences I can’t get rid of a few. These are either someone present in my best friends, partner or family’s life. I realised that would be “rude” if I delete that person.

Something that bothers me a lot is to know that many people keeps me in friends list for imagining that one day, they may need me for something. Well, if you keep someone in your Facebook friends list thinking this way, you need to rethink what friendship really means.

If by reason of work contact, opportunities of whatever the purpose, for this they invented LinkdIn! People, make a profile on LinkedIn, the idea is to have there people whom you only have professional interests and that are not part of their circle of friends and neither are part of your personal life.

Especially for me Facebook has always been a very important tool to keep in touch with people who are far away. It’s the easiest way to group friends and family, share photos, ideas, events and messages in a way that everyone can see it. So I consider it something very intimate, and over time I’ve been noticing my selectivity about the content I share there. There were moments that I stopped myself from sharing for worrying about what people would think.

But hey, shouldn’t I have just people who knows me and won’t judge me? I noticed that I did not want to share my life with certain people, and so I started to use that filter.

Another measure that I’ve taken was to get some people I didn’t want to see their 10 selfies a day, 15 religious messages, and other stuff like that in my news feed, in a filter Facebook created called “Acquaintances”. When you put them there, you do not see their posts so often. And by contrast, I gathered my best friends in the list called “Best Friends” as Facebook prioritises posts from this list in my feed. There are a few more other tricks I use, but it would make another post here. If you are interested to know them, comment here and I’ll do another post.

I have also noticed my friends expressing the same questions by commenting:

“Honestly, for me I would delete all, would leave only 50 Facebook friends, I don’t like so many people seeing everything I post.”

“I need to do a clean up, a lot of unnecessary people”

“I have X person on Facebook just to laugh at what X posts, very ridiculous”

“Would rather not post this, not to cause discord”

We have control of selecting who we have, who sees what you post, etc. It’s all about using Facebook and tools to make it a healthy and positive experience, not a vain and futile circus exhibitionism, or a timid and neutral presence that makes the idea of being in a social network lose its meaning.

Tell me what you think about it, if you have been through the same situations.
Do you use these filters and tools?
How has your experience on Facebook been?

PT/  O Facebook é seu amigo?

Este ano eu comecei um sério questionamento sobre a forma que colecionamos amigos no Facebook, e qual a verdadeira importância de mantê-los. De tempos há tempos eu sempre fui do tipo que deletava as pessoas que havia adicionado por ter conhecido através de um amigo, ou colega, mas que não permaneceram na minha vida. Só que agora eu levei isso a um outro nível.

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