Facebook and the Demise of Goodbye

A former colleague and good friend announced plans a few months ago to sell her local home and move to another state in a completely different part of the country. She has many good friends in my area, and amid all the preparations associated with getting the house ready for sale and making moving arrangements, she had to squeeze in time to say goodbye in person to her friends individually, as she had decided not to have a final gathering. 

My turn came, and we had dinner and said our goodbyes. I was fully aware that I would likely never see this individual again in my lifetime. My friend’s new city is not an obvious “bucket-list” place. My wife and I would probably not pick it out for a vacation, and neither of us have any family in that area or any business reason to go there. And as we talk about lifetime, while I have a ways go yet, in the great scheme of things, there’s not all that much of that left.

The modern difference in all this, however, is that my former colleague and I are Facebook friends. I was reluctant to join FB a few years ago, but she was one of the first to welcome me to it when I did. Being part of a younger generation and being who she is, she “shares” (there’s another word whose future I’m worried about) almost everything, and as she writes beautifully and her posts are almost always interesting, she has a large following.

In the old days, when you said goodbye in person in the circumstances described here, that might be it, unless you wanted to rack up phone bills or exchange letters (remember those?). There was goodbye, because there would be physical distance, so it really meant something.

In my friend’s case, she would not be leaving for about a month after our dinner, but she continued to post on FB, and I continued to follow. As there’s a drama king in me, I was moved to say goodbye on FB several more times; I’m a movie buff, and the best ones always seem to have logical endings. Anyway, she finally launched her cross-country road trip to get to her new home, FB posting, of course, all the way, and I and her large group of friends were able to “follow” her. It felt almost like she hadn’t left at all.

As in real (as opposed to virtual) life, there are all kinds of relationships possible on Facebook, and you can control their intensity, both on “input” and “output.” You obviously can control what you write and who sees it, as can your friends. You can “hide” the posts of the most annoying people from your input stream (“news feed”), and there’s even the nuclear option: you can “unfriend” someone.  

But “goodbye,” as some of us used to know it, can just about disappear from your life, if you choose, in our new ultra-connected world -- as perhaps time and distance already have.

Friends, Followers and Figures

After running out of useful ways of spending time one day this week, I happened to open my Facebook Timeline and noticed that the number of Friends had dropped by one.

I still have a little self-respect, so I’m not going to tell you how many FB friends I have, other than it’s a lot more than Twitter followers (still have found relatively little use for that). In any case, though there’s no good reason for it, I’m consumed with curiosity as to why the number of Friends went down.

There are a few possibilities. It could be some kind of Facebook glitch, though that is, of course, highly unlikely. Or, it may be that somebody pulled the plug on Facebook, especially if they live in a dicey foreign country. But it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that someone pulled the plug on ME – I’ve been “unfriended.”

So now, questions arise: Was it something I said? Did I zig politically when I should have zagged, or pan the wrong movie, or hit the “Like” button for some tragic story? Was it my spelling or English usage? Did someone take me literally when I was trying to be cleverly sarcastic?

I may, of course, be able to figure out the answer if I determine who left, but the plug-puller doesn’t have to disclose that. I don’t have a lot of FB friends – I don’t collect them – but there are enough so that it would be a fairly difficult task to go through and dope out who was there once, and isn’t now.

But I have to draw the line somewhere. There are enough figures to keep track of in life – cholesterol count, blood pressure, BMI, fat percentage in meat – and even my age. And that’s a number that’s going up soon – meaning I should be a little more careful about what I spend an ever-diminishing amount of time worrying about.