Straight Strength by Shimone Samuel

I'm noticing a new trend in the social network: deactivation. What I find most interesting are the reasons behind some of these deactivations. Among them, people deactivating when their emotional reaction to the real and virtual worlds overlap.

It may suck when a friend flakes on you but that's where it ends in the real world. Now with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and others you also get to find out what they're really doing instead of coming to your party. And that's gotta hurt. So much that you may start to wonder - why am I even on this network? So you just delete your profile rather than deal with it or respond. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons but these are the 3 most recent examples I've heard:

1. You have a falling out with a friend at a party - but you're still friends on FaceBook. You may no longer be interested in hanging out anymore but deleting them from FaceBook? That's kind of harsh. Then you're feed gets updated with all the good times they're having with your other friends - they all went to a barbecue and you weren't invited. This turns in to days and weeks, maybe a month and before long you are just so flippin' sick of reading how wonderful their life is and how oh-so-wonderful the ski trip everyone went on was.
2. A friend calls to tell you they're sorry but can't make it to your kids birthday party because they're sick or stuck with a ton of work over the weekend. The next day you notice they uploaded pictures on FaceBook - pictures from some other party or a day at the beach. You're thoroughly offended - I thought we were friends?
3. A friend you thought was intelligent gets in to a flame-war on your status update. They're not even responding to you but to someone else's comment on your post. What's worse is you completely disagree with what they're saying and are embarrassed to be associated with them in this context.You don't want to stir up trouble or ruin a friendship over some FaceBook postings but the experience has left you unhinged.

There are ways to handle this other than deactivating your account (grouping, filtering, hiding, etc.) but for the purpose of this post I'm more interested in the 'why'.

As the social web evolves and people begin to understand the etiquette (much the same as they now understand say, how spam works) there will be a lot more thought put in to how people interact with one other in cyberspace. I believe the networks themselves will begin to respond to the needs of these types of situations as well (for instance FaceBook has modified the friend request option from "Ignore" to "Not Now") and in time it will be much easier to cope with real-life emotions from virtual hurt feelings. For now, be true to your friends - both online and off.