"To Unfriend or not to Unfriend: That is the Facebook Question"

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/01/netiquette.unfriending/index.html


The article I chose for this week is titled "To Unfriend or not to Unfriend: That is the Facebook Question" and was written by Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich on cnn.com. It discusses different scenarios in which it is appropriate to "defriend" a person on the popular social network site "facebook." I find that this sheds light on how much friends made over the web mean to people in today's culture. Less than a decade ago people would not have thought twice about deleting someone off of their friends list; the fact of the matter was that they would either keep in contact in person and not online or just simply had gone their separate ways and never talked anymore anyway. Today things have changed drastically however and defriending someone on facebook is treated almost as a face-to-face break-up. I find this to be a disturbing indication of my generation in particular's increasing reliance on technology to communicate with others. When people resort to things like facebook to carry out entire relationships rather than simply to have a quick conversation or to easily keep in contact with someone far away, then we are truly on our way to a total depersonalization of human contact.