Our Guide to Running into People You Unfriended on Facebook in Public

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that our Facebook friend lists are similar to our real life friend lists, in that they are both smaller and hopefully more meaningful than those kept by many of our peers. We are more than simply not impressed by your 1500+ “friend” list, we are in full-on “Really!?” mode. This is just another way that you’re doing it wrong (“it” being Facebook, but also probably life). Are you maintaining any sort of meaningful relationships with all of these people? Do you think that you could answer, “Who’s [NAME]?” to every single single entry if we went through your list?

We could go on and on, but we’re not here to rant or lecture today, we’re here to help. If you’re anything like us, you semi-annually have a Facebook purge (which should never be annoyingly advertised with a “If you’re still reading this, then I didn’t delete you!” post). To stay on our Facebook friend list, a person must be someone who:
A. Hasn’t completely fucked us over/broken our hearts
B. We would actually call a friend
C. We have seen in the past year and will likely see in the next year (mutual friends, co-workers, classmates, etc.)
D. We cannot delete because of obligations/guilt (childhood friends, weird family members, references, etc.)
E. Provides us with some form of entertainment (funny cat pictures, links to thought-provoking articles, general ineptitude, etc.)

Rarely is the deletion a malicious act. Time goes by. We change schools, jobs, locations, and group affiliations, and we cannot keep up all of the relationships we begin during all these different periods of our lives. Life goes on and we gotta clean that shit up. However, it’s inevitable that you will, at some point in your life, run into an ex-Facebook friend. This can be a difficult situation for both parties, the unfriender and the unfriendee, especially when each of them almost always knows who did what.

Oh God, I wish this wasn’t happening

Last weekend, Anya went out with the Libertarian to the local breakfast joint/drug den and was OF COURSE seated next to a booth full of people we went to high school with, the makeup of which ranged from ex-lover to vague enemy. After the typical “how long can I go pretending that I haven’t noticed you sitting there?” she and Paul’s ex-lover feigned surprise and greeting at the same time. Now, obviously the dynamics here are many and varied, but the real fuckup here was that Anya mentioned to one girl at the table how much she enjoys seeing her dog pictures on Facebook (this was genuine, but also a good indicator of how swimmingly that conversation was going).

Fine, the dog is not quite this adorable.

Having unfriended at least two other people at the table in the name of Why Should I Give You A Window Into My Life You Creepass, this probably wasn’t the best thing she could have said. Learn from her mistakes, and adopt one of the following techniques to deal with the icy silence or hurt confrontations from those you thought you had left behind.

Option A: Lie, lie, lie some more
Coming in very low on the maturity scale is our first option, just lie about it. This works especially well for people who are technologically incompetent and/or prone to believing things like “if babies are born underwater they have gills”. When confronted about your sudden disappearance from their Newsfeed feel free to say anything ranging from “Oh my gosh, it’s so weird, I think Facebook just deleted a bunch of my friends for no reason!” to “Yeah, I’ve been trying to rebuild my friend list since my Facebook was hacked.” (Also can be used to explain your Spotify boy band fetish) You’ll both feel pretty bad afterwards, but it’s better than admitting “I don’t wish ill upon you, I just literally couldn’t care less about your crappy job/sad engagement/Tumblr reposts/life.”

Option B: Completely awkward and inappropriate avoidance
Anya opted for this, the middle of the road on the maturity scale. This maneuver is only good for encounters that you know for a fact will be brief and situations where you have an obvious and readily available escape route. It’s very simple: avoid eye contact, talk about very generic topics with anyone in the group that’s not them (the weather! your pancakes! that unfortunate looking baby your mutual ex friend just had!), and then flee as quickly as possible. If you’re good at this sort of thing, definitely do the all encompassing smile greet so they can’t say you completely ignored them, because you were addressing the whole group with your concerns about the state of the five year class reunion plans (namely, that it’s happening). Hit it and quit it, rip it off like a band-aid, etc.

Option C: Be an adult and pretend like it never happened (ideal)
This is how we deal with the people in our lives who have fallen out of favor or are on the shit list: we suck it up and have a civil conversation with them. In order to apply Option C, we need to believe that the person we’ve unfortunately encountered has the good sense to join us in ignoring the fact that we don’t care for each other and just focus on getting all of our humblebrags in before we are able to go our separate ways in the elevator/on the street corner/down the hallway. In this case, you will need to rush in and get busy catching up before they have time to bring up the fact that you must not care that much about what they’re doing since you UNFRIENDED THEM like six months ago.

Hannah’s “friend” on her recently published memoir: “It just really poured out of me!”

Good luck!

U Mad, Bro? A Compilation of the Most Ridiculous Things That Inspire Anonymous Internet Fury

Alternatively titled “We Don’t Comment and Neither Should You” or “Facebooking Lawyering: Never A Good Idea” (See “The Sequel: Facebook Evangelizing, Even Worse”)

Unless you look like this.

First of all, don’t you think we should be in charge of writing titles for theses? Just take a quick pass through our Archives and tell us we wouldn’t be great at that. Unfortunately, this is a relatively recent skill, and we’ve turned in more papers than we’d like to admit with just “Title” typed in at the top, waiting for a burst of creativity that never came. How sad. However, let’s turn from the emotional problems of our academic past, and focus instead on the topic of today’s article: things people get really goddamn upset about on the internet that they wouldn’t dream of touching in person.

What’s that you say? “But Anya, Paul, isn’t that list absolutely endless? Isn’t the anonymity of the internet almost wholly responsible for the slow decay of modern society? Haven’t we all agreed that that’s how the kids these days are bullying each other?” Yes, sure, the internet is a double edged sword, the one ring to rule them all, with great power comes great responsibility. But we’re not here to tackle those kind of topics. Those literally are thesis material (holla Master’s students! We’re here if you need us, drop us a line if you need a title, or want this one), and we’re more the sort to make mocking lists.

Per usual, our realm of expertise is specific.

As people who spend a fair amount of time online (like WAY too much), we’re pretty experienced in the ways of online forums/comments sections/etc. As people who exist, we’re totally guilty of confirmation bias, in that we seek out articles and sites and discussions that support our beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our strongest beliefs are centered squarely on some of the most controversial issues, which means a guaranteed load of bullshit by the time we get to the comments section. YAY.

Things like women’s rights, abortion, gay marriage, and whether or not we should care about the Royal Baby are things we expect to be hot button issues, with vitriolic fights between the right and the correct. You can visit any page that so much as mentions these issues, and read a series of tired arguments and quickly devolves into name calling. In fact, like fights with our parents, we might as well not even have them anymore, since we’re freakishly good and predicting exactly how the conversation will go, down to the turns of phrase.

“And then she’s going to make passive aggressive comments about your life decisions.”

But there are other, stranger forces at work here. There are things on the internet that make people into monsters, tear relationships asunder, turn perfectly normal (?) people into vicious trolls the likes of which the undersides of bridges have never seen. Why people choose to be so personally offended about things that are so obviously none of their business is really surprising to us...haha but really. If you’ve read much of this blog at all, you’ll have noticed that we’re pretty sassy and pretty hard on the general public. We just so badly want to everyone to get it together and be decent to each other! And no matter how snarky we seem when we’re taking out our fury on our poor little keyboards, we assure you that we are actually very pleasant in person. Sure, we have our fair share of anonymous internet fury, but we’re not directing it at specific people, demanding their ritual sacrifice for having naturally blonde hair or following the paleo diet.

But we would totes turn some of them into rats.

We’re not firing off emails to our legislators full of incomprehensible punctuation and a very evident lack of research on the topic at hand. We’re not leaving nasty reviews on Yelp because we don’t understand basic veterinary medicine (holla at the lady who was mad that she spent money on antibiotics and her kitten got better so she “obviously didn’t need them”!) or restaurant etiquette (holla at the guy who had passive aggressive fights with a three year old and seated himself next to us at breakfast last weekend!). As much as humankind tends to drive us crazy, we do operate under the premise “innocent until proven guilty and then also benefit of the doubt in case you’re having an especially bad day”.

Here are the things we have found that the denizens of the internet cannot read about without instantly turning into dickheads of epic proportions:

1) Vegetarianism (or Vegans, or really any kind of specific diet)

If we have to read “PETA = People Eating Tasty Animals” or the pseudo science of why meat protein is actually essential to our diets one more time, it will be just another day. Or how STUPID the Paleo diet is because OUR ANCESTORS ACTUALLY ATE X,Y,Z AND EVOLUTION GUYZ”. On the flip side “I will be laughing as all of you meat eaters die horrific deaths from heart attacks and cancer because I will never get sick or go to tell because of my respect for LYFE”. Stop the diet shaming! At least on the internet.

You’re all this guy.

We’re sorry everyone is so goddamn annoying, but shut.the.fuck.up. Eat what you’re going to eat, don’t eat what you’re not, and stop making everyone’s life decisions about you. WHY DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE PUTTING INTO THEIR BODIES? Literally we could not give two shits about strangers using heroin, why would we get on their dicks about carbs?

2) Talking during movies

Yes, we shit you not, the number of casual death threats over talking during movies is actually astronomical. Anya is a movie talker, and will never stop doing that. Her inability to stay silent during movies is something everyone around her has to either enjoy or put up with. HOWEVER, she would never do that shit in a movie theater unless it was empty or full of people that were being so inconsiderate that her “movie talking” morphs into “Can you honestly please shut the fuck up?” to the teenagers behind her. No one likes a loudmouth at the movies, let alone the cell phone answerers, the shriekers, and the children crying. Does that mean we have to summarily execute these people? No. Calm the fuck down and just get management to throw them out the movie.

Unless it’s this hot mess, then loud scoffing is allowed.

(To be fair, this type of inconsiderate behavior is often not an isolated trait, and if these people are just generally breaking the unspoken social contract, we support execution).

3) Breast feeding in public/any type of parenting shit

“If you’re not a mother you CAN’T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND” “I give no shits about your feelings, this is a NATURAL PROCESS OF FOODZ FOR MY BAAAAABY”, etc. Unfortunately, the Great Kate Wait has given rise to the number of articles about our least favorite thing: children. Doubly unfortunate: the mommy bloggers are out in force, reading these articles and showing their “tiger stripes” or “mama bear instincts” by being incredibly judgmental and shitty to everyone who is not a parent/wants to go out to eat in a child free environment once in a goddamn while. Let us just say, they are setting a terrific example for the next generation of entitled, self obsessed, the entire world must bow down before my very specific preferences assholes they’re raising. THANKS.

We know this list could be endless...what ridiculous shit have you seen on the internet that made you go “really?”?

[Fake Kate Photo by Alison Jackson]

Facebook Friends, How Do I Hate Thee?

Let me count the ways.

Unlike Julia Stiles, we actually do HATE you.

Remember when Facebook required a college email address to sign up? Those were the days. That was technically a little before our time, but Anya got in on the ground floor when the kids in a summer class she was taking at our nearby school made her join so they could work on a group project via this great new social networking site. Before we had to worry about our grandmas seeing everything we did online, before you could access the site from your cell phone, back when your status had to start with “Paul Smith is...”

If you think we miss those days, you’re only partially correct. The thing that we miss most about olden times Facebook is the fact that no one really knew what they were doing on it. Don’t get us wrong, there was still the odd emo status, the beginnings of aggressive cyber-stalking carried over from MySpace and Xanga and Livejournal (remember that shit, you guys? Every once in awhile we still look up those old Xanga sites we used to stalk, and we have basically the same reactions now as we did then. We’ve matured from cackling hyena pups to cackling hyena pack leaders), etc. Nowadays? Ugh.

Here’s the thing, Facebook World: You’re doing it wrong. Luckily, we’re here to detail the right and the oh so wrong ways to use Facebook, complete with examples. Look, we get that for some reason there’s a push for creating a brand for ourselves. People like to be able to easily categorize ALL THE THINGS, including other people. Employers might be looking for a certain “type” and you want to be that guy! Sure. But it’s so goddamn annoying to watch all of these people you know in real life put on a persona that you know is bullshit.

The most common offenders:

1. Look how happy I am (with my new house/job/relationship)

 2. Look how smart I am (pursuing an advanced degree and being so busy)

 3. Look how pretty I am (please like my 2,376 photos of myself. Photoshopped.)

 4. Look how liberal I am (I support basic human rights by changing my profile pic)

 5. Look how brave I am (standing up for my intolerant religious beliefs)

 6. Look how cool I am (with my obscure bands and thrift-store clothes)

 7. Look how sensitive I am (with my sincere, heartfelt responses to the tragedies of strangers)

Find our thoughts on the oversharers (Look at me getting this cavity filled, look at me getting my prescriptions filled at Meijer, look at all of the friends I have, look at my stitches/surgery wounds/IV/hospital band, I neutered my dog, here’s a pic of his nuts! etc.) here.

So that’s pretty bad, right? When faced with that bullshit every time we log on, some of you might say “If you hate it that much, just get off Facebook! No one will miss you, you clearly spend enough time together that you don’t need it, stop complaining and deactivate!” If this is your attitude,

You guys, we NEED Facebook, and we have earned the privilege of using it by not being fucking assholes. Please find below our list of acceptable ways to use Facebook which do not entail annoying the snot out of other people. Because that’s kind of how we go about life.

Proper way to use Facebook (us)

-Share funny picture or video with friends, don’t have to wade through the shit that is tumblr.

-Spy on people and mock

-Blasts from the past

-Stalking work acquaintances