FYI (and this is to clear up any potential misunderstandings, since I had one last week of this sort when I was briefly off of Facebook): I almost never defriend people. So, if I no longer appear in your feed, it is because I am off of Facebook for a while (or because youve blocked me--which I completely understand ;) ). I defriended a couple of people early on when they made explicitly racist posts, but these days even with that I am more likely to just ignore or criticize a persons position than defriend them. The only two people I have recently defriended were people who asked me to by posting, if you agree with x (gun control was one of them) then defriend me. My only response in such a situation is to honor their request, because they clearly dont want to discuss the issue. The only other thing I sometimes do is block certain images from my feed (violence to animals is particularly difficult for me to view--I know this is ironic coming from someone whose work is often about disturbing and violent representations and I know that my animal rights friends post these images out of the best of ethical motives, but we all have our contradictions and limits to what we want to view). To me, though, Facebook is at its best when it resembles the 18th Century public sphere: anarchic, democratic, and tending toward the unruly. If I am only ever communicating with like minded people by selectively trimming my friends list, then it loses some of its best qualities (this is also why I dont create separate groups to post different things to). Having said this, there are also times when I need to retreat from certain debates just for the sake of personal sanity. Then again, the Facebook algorithm does a decent amount of this self selecting anyway and we know that its real motive is to sell, sell, sell...
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 18:46:42 +0000
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