Evaluate Your Friends’ List: Social Media is about Sociality
- Please note that I am making this post not simply based on my observation as a user of social media but importantly as a student of digital public communication culture, which social media is a constitutive component. Therefore, let’s reason together. I welcome your comments.
- Please do not delete or unfriend people because they share different political beliefs or are otherwise aligned with a political party you do not like. If you do that, you will be promoting DAILY ME (Negroponte, 1995) or HOMOPHILY (Sunstein, 2017) or projecting ECHO CHAMBERING (BBC, 2018; Quora, 2018) – that is accessing communication that reinforces your preferences, gating yourself from contrary opinions or chorusing ideas that are in congruence with your values and beliefs. More dangerously, you will be projecting intolerance and hatred. Learn to accommodate opposing views.
By now some of you (and I remember Jagunmolu Oluwadare Lasisi and Jamila Jalingo) would have come to the realisation that there are those peopling your friends’ list on social media, whose online friendship you do not need. Some people call them MONITORING SPIRITS, 😂🤣 to use a popular ecclesiastic Nigerian parlance.
So, if you’ve got the time, you may need to review your friends’ list and delete or unfriend those occupying spaces meant for those who are your followers – because those FOLLOWERS may need to be on your friends’ list by virtue of the pattern, tempo and sophistication of their engagements with your posts.
Social media are tools for information gathering and sharing, relationship management, transformative communication, and as Fuchs (2017) perceptively argued, for collaboration and cooperative work. Importantly, sociality is central to social media – it is their most defining matrix among the categorizations within the digital public communication culture. So, they are about sociality and engagement, if there’s no engagement they lose their characterization as media of sociality.
Accordingly, in an illustrative and more concrete sense, and using Facebook as an example, if you know you engage reasonable well on social media and you do, for instance, at least a post weekly but you have people on your friends’ list, who at least post bimonthly or once in a month or even biannually but in two years they never engaged you, then you probably don’t need them as online friends because they do not add value – WITHOUT REASON NOTHING SHOULD BE DONE – there must be reason for whatever you do. It is called motive.
Let me reiterate. If you have made posts on Facebook about your successes and challenges, birthdays, your spouse’s birthday, your children’s, or about a loved one who got married or otherwise recorded successes, or perhaps you have had reasons to memorialize the dead, and in a spate of two years, your ‘so-called’ Facebook friend whom you have engaged or interacted with, never engaged you – I mean, in two years, he or she made no comment about even one of your posts, no ‘LIKE’, ‘LOVE’ or something connected to that, and such person is hale and hearty and are relatively active as I have suggested above, then you may not need them as online friends. Except perhaps you are not bothered by their indifference and you have no ‘invites’ waiting to be accommodated because you have reached your limit.
Please do not delete or unfriend people because they share different political beliefs or are otherwise aligned with a political party you do not like. If you do that, you will be promoting DAILY ME (Negroponte, 1995) or HOMOPHILY (Sunstein, 2017) or projecting ECHO CHAMBERING (BBC, 2018; Quora, 2018) – that is accessing communication that reinforces your preferences, gating yourself from contrary opinions or chorusing ideas that are in congruence with your values and beliefs. More dangerously, you will be projecting intolerance and hatred. Learn to accommodate opposing views.
Finally, for those who are not online because they don’t want technology companies to profile them, that’s deception. If you ever used a smartphone, sent an electronic mail, bought items online (e.g. on Amazon), used WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook), just know you have been profiled by either Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest of them (Tufekci, 2018), and that may be one reason you receive certain advertisements when you are online.
Please note that I am making this post not simply based on my observation as a user of social media but importantly as a student of digital public communication culture, which social media is a constitutive component. Therefore, let’s reason together. I welcome your comments.