Myspace [MySpace? I keep seeing both now, even ON the site] has added a new button to its bulletin posts. Along with “Reply to poster,” there’s now “Delete from friends.” It looks like this:
Due to ambiguous wording and lack of referent, at first I thought this was so that you could delete your own bulletin post from your friends’ sight (I discovered it while looking at one of my own posts), but that made no sense because you post your bulletins specifically for your friends to see. Nope, this button is to remove the person who posted the bulletin from your list of friends. In other words, it’s to de-Myspace [defriend? back in the day (by which I mean in 2004), this was called defriendstering] them.
Doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but I find this really interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it enables you to defriend someone for something they’ve SAID, not something they ARE. Rather than realizing you’re not friends with someone anymore (note this could be a band, or a performance group, as well), or that they’re just not someone whose profile you want to link to (this is probably mostly applicable to bands), you decide you don’t want their friendship because you are a) embarrassed or b) annoyed by their discourse. Either because of the fact, let’s say, of their using the bulletin board for a certain reason, or because of the content of what they’ve posted.
This relates to the second interesting thing, which is that this button acknowledges what has become a re-purposing and (in my opinion as a user) flagrant mis-use of the bulletin board. Bulletins are design features that enable people to post a message to all their friends at once; the message doesn’t get sent to their friends but rather posted on their friends’ individual boards, which they then can look at or not. They’re great for spreading the word about social events (”party tonight, please come”), asking questions to people (”can anyone give me a ride to Richmond tomorrow?”), or announcing life changes (”moving to Michigan soon!”). But recently - well, I’m guessing it started pretty much right away for certain heavy users (”MySpace whores”) but more recently for average users - bulletins have been taken over by posts that aren’t in any real sense useful. People post memes (surveys, chain letters) or articles they find, links to pictures of themselves, or simply cries for attention (”go look at my page! I changed it!”).
From the perspective of someone who finds social networking sites socially useful and not just entertaining (though certainly that, as well), this is very frustrating. What ends up happening is that your bulletin board gets clogged with the useless bulletins, while some useful ones may fly under your radar because they’ve been bumped down by the useless stuff - your bulletin only shows 5 post headlines at a time on your homepage, until you click to “View All Bulletin Entries.” SO, inserting the “Delete from friends” button at the stage of viewing the bulletin entry itself is funny - if you press it, you’re probably saying “I never want to see this person’s useless bulletin crap again,” or “Wow, her favorite music is country? I really don’t think I can be friends with her again,” or “Wow, she’s really not cool at all. Nevermind.” Delete! No more shall your social space be contaminated by the avatar of a less-cool-than-thou “friend.”
Of course, there’s also the option that seeing someone’s bulletin actually reminds you that they exist and are your friend, and once you see it you think, “Oh yeah, that person…we’re really not friends” or worse, “Who?” because it’s someone you befriended after meeting once or something. As part of the whole social networking research project, I’d love to see some discussion of defriending: when it happens, how, why, and what it really means within the milieu.
