At the end of December 2011, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users. A whopping eighty percent were from outside the U.S. and Canada. More than half this staggering population — 483 million people — are loyal, active, daily users. Add it together and Facebook permeates the world every second of every day.
To frame that, Facebook trails only China (1.3 billion) and India (1.2 billion) in global population. Since there are seven billion people in the entire world, Facebook’s current (and growing) market penetration is staggering.
There is little doubt that Facebook’s inexorable march to the unfathomable magic number — one billion global users — will arrive sooner than anyone imagined.
Available now in more than 70 languages, Facebook continues to expand linguistic options. Since languages open new gateways, millions (if not billions) of brand new users loom on the Facebook horizon.
A second reason for sustained mushrooming membership is that the tentacles of Facebook’s mobile apps are dramatically evolving and expanding.
By the close of 2011, more than 425 million monthly active users — basically half of Facebook’s active user base — were using Facebook mobile products. This saturation underscores a dramatic marketplace power play: mini-portability strengthening, not weakening, business.
With technology innovation rocketing to wireless, the wireless industry is inventing growth vehicles to bring to Facebook’s front door and service options to expand its reach.
But the Facebook phenomenon is also creating free-form, end-user experiences that vary widely in purpose and utility. At the core of the Facebook community concept is friendship, which begs the question, “What exactly is a friend?”
By dictionary definition a friend is “somebody emotionally close; an acquaintance, ally, advocate of cause, or patron.”
Facebook relationships, of course, stretch this description like a rubber band. While childhood and high school friends sometimes search and reunite, other times Facebook “friends” suddenly appear from cyberspace as strangers with agendas.
Add in requests from people we ate lunch with decades ago but haven’t seen since, friends of friends, people we meet in passing, and others we barely know but give the benefit of the doubt, and voila: an instant colony with busy tunnels of different motivations.
Facebook friendship’s mercury-like fluidity is part of the tool’s attraction because memories and possibilities stream in and out. This is instrumental to the Facebook drug, since those two things — memories and possibilities — pique our curiosity.
But friendship creation — the decision to issue, accept, or deny a friendship request — also comes with evolutionary decision-making: who do you like more, who do you like less?
Increasing numbers of Facebook users are opting to “unfriend” sources of negative emotional impact.
Yesterday you were my friend. Today you are not. You are are longer worthy. You and your opinions are banished to the cyberswamp of irrelevance. Rather than tell the person to his or her face, a user simply checks a box; and just like that the irritating other is banished from future digital intrusion.
While ending a digital friendship is invisibly easy, emotions run high when people find out they’ve been dropped. Unfriending is easy to monitor, since new apps notify users when they have been dropped from someone elseʼs Facebook list. Many do not like it; they interpret being dropped as an insult.
Unfriending is a growing phenomenon. It now happens so frequently that recently the Oxford Dictionary named unfriending its “Word of the Year.”
Trends, of course, beg questions. In this case, why do people unfriend someone?
In a word: politics.
A recent article in the Washington Post touched on this growing social exile behavior, citing data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Pew studied real time trends on social networking sites and drew a clear-cut statistical conclusion: Users who unfriend someone do so primarily because they do not agree with the other person’s political postings. The evolving presidential election is expect to increase the frequency of these actions and reactions.
According to Pew Research, we unfriend because:
• Someone posts too often about political subjects. One in ten Facebook users have blocked or hidden someone for this reason. (disclosure note: I am one of the ten percent).
• Someone posts something so disagreeable others find it offensive. One out of eleven Facebook users have done this.
• Of personal arguments about politics. One in twelve cited this reason, although last time I checked it takes two to have an argument.
• A post that may or does offend my friends. Five percent of people have taken action due to this.
• I disagree with your political posts. Disagreement in and of itself is not nearly as big a deal as repetitive political beat-downs. One in twenty-five would pull the friendship trigger due to this; ten percent will do it for political repetition.
Although to a large extent political tolerance is built into the Facebook culture, nearly two-of-five surveyed were surprised to learn their friendsʼ political beliefs were different than what they had assumed. Differences are not friendship-fatal; but having those differences jammed down your throat certainly can be.
American cultural writer Lee Siegel keeps his finger on the pulse of trends and drew similar conclusions.
“The very act of unfriending acknowledges that the Facebook definition of friend is different from the traditional,” said Siegel, author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.
“Unfriending reflects the instrumentalization and commodifying of friendship on Facebook. Why unfriend someone at all? After all, in the real world, you donʼt just ignore an obnoxious relative.”
As much as I wince at photos of other people’s food, there is no emotion in meat loaf. Then again, perhaps my vegan friends are mortally wounded.
Support your friends, do not annoy them. Avoid religion, avoid politics, and strive to be positive in the lives of others.
After all, none of us has too many friends. And all of us would benefit from having more.