“Friends” on Facebook are quite a different matter to friends in the rest of life. You may or may not count all your closest friends as “friends” on Facebook, but you’re almost certain to have “friended”—or been “friended” by—people for whom the conventional sense of that word is inappropriate.
My own Facebook “friends list” includes many close members of my own family, some of my closest friends from life and work, and a whole host of professional and tangential contacts, as well as people whom I’ve never even met in person. This is fairly typical. The fact that a social network with well over a billion registered accounts chose “to friend” as its principal verb of interconnection has not so much shifted the older sense of the word as created an entirely new one—drawing attention in the process to both the social network’s aspirations, and the gulf between its rhetoric and actuality.
The word friend itself comes almost directly from the Old English word freond, itself derived from the verb freogan, meaning to love or bestow favor upon. The idea of “friending” as well as “befriending” has been used as a verb for over half a millennium—but it wasn’t until the public advent of Facebook in 2005 that its contemporary sense arrived.
The use of the warmly emotional term friend, rather than the somewhat colder social networking notion of contacts, is central to Facebook’s ethos. It has also created a particularly grating linguistic contortion in the form of the verb to “unfriend” someone, in the sense of removing them from your Facebook contacts list. It’s both a marvelously economical formulation and a reflection of the binary principles on which social networking is based, where all it takes is a click of a button completely to negate an action or status.
To be “unfriended” is, moreover, to be instantaneously cut off from someone else without even knowing it has happened. While the social network is quick to announce incoming “friend requests” to its users, the process of being unfriended happens silently and without notification of any kind: a fact that, inevitably, has bred a website called “Unfriend finder” expressly designed to help you discover who no longer wants to be your friend.96
Perhaps a more accurately descriptive term for social media contacts can be found in Twitter’s popularizing of “followers” and the idea of “following” someone as a description. Again, there’s an echo of a physical original in the description (and the word’s origins are, like those of friend, Old English, from folgian, “to accompany or pursue”), but the metaphorical sense is also ancient. What is new, however, is the inevitable inversion of “unfollow”—together with the notion of a “follower count” as an increasingly important online status symbol, allowing people to put a precise figure on the level of public interest in their own words and actions.
Young verbs like “to unfavorite” and “to unlike” follow in these binary footsteps, giving the lie along the way to the fuzzy feeling of comfort that words like favorite are presumably intended to evoke. In fact, couplets of this kind are among the most distinctive vocabulary to emerge from the digitization of social relationships and self-expression: from like and unlike to the ancestor of them all, click and unclick.
With each follower being, at least theoretically, an actual person who has actively chosen to follow somebody else, the question “how many followers do you have?” is fast becoming a universal index of impact for public personalities and brands alike—with the title of world’s most-followed Twitter personality hotly competed. At the time of writing, in late 2015, Katy Perry led the world with over 77 million followers—around 10 million more than the world’s most-followed politician, Barack Obama; and 50 million ahead of the world’s most-followed geek, Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Never has it been easier precisely to measure how much less the world is interested in you than in somebody else. And if you’re looking for an especially expressive category of contemporary rejection, consider “ghosting”: the practice of turning someone else into a digital ghost by cutting off all communication with them. To be “ghosted”—to become a “ghostee”—is to be dumped as a contact, friend, or partner via sudden, sustained silence. Excluded from someone else’s social media updates, messages, and acknowledgments, you might as well no longer exist to them—a cruelly poetic species of digital death.