UNFRIEND: New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year

My friend, Tom, reports to me that The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as the word of the year. Evidently they do this every year, and, as in this case, the word is a new word which has been created as a result of technology or the latest popular usage. Those of you who are involved in Facebook or Twitter will recognize right away that unfriend is a verb which evolves from the practice of gathering friends, or regular readers. Thus, it’s not a huge jump to understand that unfriend means to eliminate someone from your list, either in advance, without them ever having been on the list, or… after further consideration…removing them from an existing list. Ouch!

A whole new journalistic ethic is arising around this “friending” exercise. You have to ask yourself, “Will this person be offended if I don’t admit them to my friends list?” Or, “How will I explain it to this person when I have eliminated them from the list?” Both are delicate situations.

And then, of course, there is the whole issue of receiving an invitation to become a friend on someone else’s list. “If I accept the invitation to be on someone’s list, what message am I sending to them?” And, of course, the opposite: “If I don’t accept the invitation….”

You can see that this is becoming difficult…and it shouldn’t be. I suspect that the difficulty comes as a result of using the word “friend” to begin with. It is a word with built-in implications of affection and relationship. Whereas the whole idea is to build up a list of people who want to read your tweets or journals. It really has little to do with levels of affection or relationship. But that is no guarantee that the person will understand it that way.

A friend of mine (in real life, not only cyber-life)said to me that people who have been adopted into the personal cyber-communication community by having used it for some time have removed the emotional catches. It's just a matter of usage. I suppose that is true for those who are sending as well as those who are receiving.

I’m not sure I want to be an unfriended; neither do I want to unfriend someone. Both tasks are far too complicated. I find the technology of writing on Facebook or Twitter to be emotionally complicated enough, without adding this level of stress. Therefore, after a brief trial I chose not to use either system.

There are some who say that these personal communication systems are the wave of the future, and represent a 21st century way of carrying on relationships. I am convinced that they are right. Just think about the recent populist upheaval in Iran, when the use of Twitter was the only means of communicating to the world what was happening in Tehran. But, like the telephone, it took many years to perfect the system until it became something everyone could understand. I suspect the same is going to be true of these tools.

In the meantime, I will continue to send snail mail notes, e-mails, and postings on my blog. Like the words to the song, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City”…I’ve "gone about as fur as I can go."