Confessions of an Accidental Facebook Slut

I recently celebrated a personal milestone of sorts: I acquired my 500th friend on Facebook.

Well, "celebrated" is the wrong word. These days, as this story in today's Wall Street Journal shows, the enviable thing is to have a trim Facebook network comprising only people one actually knows and likes; or, failing that, to have a strictly-regimented network with different tiers of access accurately reflecting degrees of real-world intimacy.

My friend list is neither of those things. It's sprawling, disorganized and sometimes cringe-worthy. A stranger browsing through it would get only the most vague and misleading idea of who I am. People I've been close to since grade school bump up against people I've never met; nodding acquaintances mingle on equal terms with extended family members and frenemies.

For some, this might be a non-issue. For me, it's uncomfortable. I'm not the sort of person who would ever rack up 500 friends, online or off. For starters, I'm lousy with names and faces. If we've met a couple times and you approach me at a party, chances are not only that I won't remember you, but that I will then make matters worse by chatting tentatively with you for five minutes before finally blurting out, "I'm sorry -- how do we know each other, again?" It's not that I don't enjoy meeting new people; it's just that every time I do, it seems to knock someone else out of the database. (I'm inclined to agree with the theory that the limit of real relationships a person can sustain is around 150.)

How did someone like me reach this point? The answer is that I was, entirely by circumstance and uncharacteristically, an early Facebook adopter. Back in the days when its user base still consisted primarily of students and you needed a .edu email address to join, I wanted to view someone's profile page as part of a story I was reporting. (I'm pretty sure this is against Facebook's terms of use; don't report me, okay?) I signed up, thinking I would never use it again.

Then the friend requests started to trickle in, from college kids who'd known me as their summer-camp counselor, or from fellow journalists who make it their business to be on the leading edge of every trend. Soon enough, the requests started coming from actual friends, and work friends, and long-lost college friends, and friends of friends. And so on.

At first, I simply accepted every request. Why not? Having a random friend list of people I barely knew was a little pathetic, but not as pathetic as having a list that wouldn't be able to field a softball team. I did have one rule, half defense mechanism, half experiment: I didn't issue friend requests, only accepted them. That allowed me to see my bizarro friend list as less a reflection of my social success than as a function of the internet's -- and world's -- general hinkyness. Sure, my network was a weird amalgam of past and present, personal and professional, wanted and unwanted -- but isn't that how life is?

Gradually, however, the defects in my reactive non-strategy became apparent. Publicists friended me only to clutter my in-box with pitches. High-schoolers from the Deep South friended me and made me feel like a pervert. I spent long minutes trying to figure out how I knew someone behind a request, only to realize I didn't. As my list climbed into the hundreds, I realized I needed some sort of filter. I started only accepting requests from those with whom I had a few mutual contacts in common. But this rule was far from perfect, I learned, upon receiving a request from a loathsome little prick I grew up with, and with whom I share (at last count) over 100 "friends," many of them actual friends. My cursor oscillated for the better part of a minute: Follow the rule, or follow my gut? I made up my mind to hit "reject," and somehow hit "accept" instead.

Which brings us back to that Wall Street Journal story. Clearly, if I'm to restore any semblance of order to my Facebook existence, I have to start unfriending people. But how? Maybe it's because I'm from the Midwest, but failing to reciprocate an act of friendliness, even from someone I dislike, just seems mean. Is a spare, well-edited friend list worth the eternal enmity of those who realize they've been dropped? It's not like it's costing me anything to let them hang around, right?

So, most likely, I won't conduct that Facebook purge I'm considering anytime soon. And if I do, it will probably happen willy-nilly, and leave me with a list that's not much less random or ragged than the one I started with. But if you're one of those people who finds me coming up in your "suggested friends" list after you thought we were solid, just know this: It's nothing personal. Probably.

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Postscript: I should note that David Carr, Matthew Rose and Andrew Wallenstein all mined this vein with great success long before I got around to it.