things kevin hates

One of the great thoroughly average things about facebook is the ability to be friends with people you barely even know/haven’t seen since fifth grade/don’t really know but have a lot of mutual friends/met once at a party or bar. It’s wonderful to know what these people think about health care reform, see their drunken escapades, and know how they’re doing in Farmville, but it can lead to awkward real-life interactions. When you barely know people it’s usually not too difficult to avoid them, but what happens if you have a facebook friend you barely know (or haven’t even met in real life, or haven’t seen in years) and you run into that person? Stare at them awkwardly? Keep your head down and look the other way? Hug them? Start up a conversation? It’s practically impossible to know what to do in such circumstances. So, I would like to propose a solution:

If you send someone you barely know a friend request and they accept it, it’s your job to acknowledge the other person’s existence should you run into them in real life. This acknowledgment may vary tremendously depending on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, personalities, and a host of other factors, and it may or may not involve a lengthy conversation, but at the very least it needs to be a look and a nod. The thing to note here is that it’s on the person who sent the friend request to initiate things. I absolutely hate when someone sends me a friend request, I accept (as I do for pretty much anyone I know or have a lot of friends in common with), I run into them and they say nothing. As I said, I’m not asking for a much here. A nod and maybe a quick “Hey, how’s it going?” is fine. If you want a more in depth conversation, that’s fine too. One time I ran into someone who had friended me and she explained who she was and that we knew each other even though neither of us could remember exactly where we’d met. (Where we’d met finally dawned on me a year or two later.) But after that we could run into each other and have a friendly conversation, as opposed to the awkwardness I feel when I see other people I barely know who aren’t willing to say “hi.”

The same thing goes when friending people you’ve never even met. I’m not one to do this since I’m so introverted, but I usually accept other people’s requests if we have a lot of mutual friends. After all, every facebook friend is a potential reader of my blog. (It always goes back to whoring out my blog.) And I’ll usually accept requests from theatre people because you never know when they might be able to get you some work. But if I do accept a request, I expect at least a nod or a “hello” when we actually do meet.

I like to think that I’ve been good about taking these steps when I send people friend requests, although I’m much more likely to send them out to people I know fairly well and see pretty regularly. I think my solution makes a lot of sense; it puts an obligation of in-person extraversion on the person who has demonstrated the online extraversion.

P.S. I would like to acknowledge my usage of the singular they in this post. I regret that I may have offended some people’s sensibilities, and I only gave in after much consideration. But there was virtually no way for me to make my points without either sacrificing adherence to that rule, or sacrificing a great deal of clarity, sense, and meaning. Using “him or her” would have been wordy; using either “him” or “her” separately would’ve added an unnecessary element of confusion and emphasis on gender; and rewording everything would have been time-consuming and led to awkward, ungainly constructions. In a more formal venue I wouldn’t have broken this rule, but given the conversational style I use, I feel I made the best choice.