Is removing internet friends really the 2009 trend?

The internet is buzzing about it: defriending is the trend for 2009. People are said to be deleting vague acquaintances from their networking sites en masse. But there’s no sign of it actually happening yet.

It is very easy to end a friendship on the internet. You simply click on ‘remove from friends’ - and you’re done. And according to trend watchers, this defriending will be the trend for 2009. Large numbers of people will delete vague acquaintances from their networking sites, such as Facebook, which celebrated its fifth birthday on Wednesday, and professional networking site Linkedin, because they only want to keep quality contacts. It has to do with slowing down, the need for quality time, and perhaps some network site fatigue, according to all sorts of trend blogs, which seem to echo each other.

Whopper

Fast food chain Burger King played in on this last month with the Whopper Sacrifice: the company promised on Facebook to give a Whopper (the chain’s signature hamburger) to Americans who removed at least ten friends from their contacts list; the victims received a message that they were sacrificed for a free hamburger. 233,906 friends were removed before the campaign was stopped, because it violated privacy – normally people are not notified if someone ends their online friendship.

Psychological perspective

It is a story that speaks to the imagination, people who give up their vague friends in exchange for a sandwich and opt for quality friendship instead of superficial internet dealings with large numbers of contacts as a status symbol. But is it true? There is no evidence of this as yet. The ‘trend’ is being enthusiastically reported on the internet, but there are no actual stories to be found of people who have drastically shortened their contacts list, or any other information that would indicate that many people are doing that.

Researchers from research organisation TNO Delft and the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, who study social networks, have not come across the phenomenon either. And Raymond Spanjar, founder of Hyves (a networking site for Dutch youth), does not see it as a trend at all. “From the start some people have been critical of social networking sites. This report plays in on that.”

Hyves now has five million active accounts, says Spanjar, and continues to grow. “The growth in the number of accounts has fallen somewhat, but we see on the other hand that use continues to grow” – people ‘scribbling’ to each other, updating profiles, etc. Facebook (150 million users in 170 countries) also continues to grow.

Nor from a psychological perspective is it logical that people will start scrapping their friend lists. After all, having a long list of contacts doesn’t mean you have to do anything. Moreover research shows that people are strongly resistant to throwing things away, simply because it is already in their possession. This is called the endowment effect and is the reason why people’s basements are often so full. So it is not ‘defriending’ that is the trend, but rather talking and writing about it that is. If people ever get networking site fatigue, they will simply leave the sites – leaving their friend lists nicely behind.