Father Facebook Reaches Out From Beyond the Grave

Leslie Taylor, a staff reporter for The Toronto Star contributed an interesting and somewhat disturbing article for Monday October 26’s issue. Just her title alone, “Facebook urges users to reconnect with dead people,” explains it all.

As we all know, Facebook continues to update and refurbish the social networking site, and it’s latest update is the new and improved ‘Live Feed/News Feed,’ which has been causing a significant amount of uproar.  I will even admit that before reading this article, my fellow Facebook users expressed their distress with this application, ironically enough, I caught these feelings via the news feed tool itself.

To introduce you to this Live Feed, it not only provides constant updates on what your friends are doing every second, but it further offers a reconnect tool, giving you suggestions within a side bar of which Facebook friends you should “reconnect with,” or whose wall you should write on, and most particular to this article, it suggests who you should befriend based on the number of mutual friends.

Apparently Facebook does not remain up to date on the status of some people, as nearly 700 people expressed their distress about Facebook suggesting to befriend someone who has recently died.  While this would definitely be a sore spot for those that are grieving, other Facebook users are even annoyed with Facebook merely suggesting to connect with someone from their past.  Users respond to this with “you’re not my real dad,” meaning that they do not appreciate being told what to do by this modern day technology.  Others are further distraught by the suggestion of reconnecting with an ex – just when you think you are over him, bam, there he is, staring you straight in the face on your very own Facebook page.

As Facebook continues to develop its site, the users seem to perceive its updates as more and more intrusive into their personal lives. Yet Facebook states that they have the mere goal of “[crunching] all of a person’s cross-connections and [suggesting] people they should link up to or reconnect with.”  So really they just want to make users’ experience on the site more useful and to live up to the full potential of the site’s purpose of connecting and sharing with the people of their life.  But it appears that people just wish to be left alone and thus make their own friend decisions based on personal judgment.

I’m not sure about you, but I use Facebook as a means of communication.  I don’t use it to reconnect with people that didn’t care enough to keep in touch with me for the past 10 years and just want to get their friend count up.  I prefer to actually use the site for communication, not just to watch my numbers go up and make myself feel popular.  It’s today’s version of the ‘olden day’ MSN, or e-mail, you wouldn’t send an e-mail to someone you aren’t currently in contact with, so why would you befriend someone who isn’t actually your friend?  And furthermore, if Facebook ever suggested for me to befriend my dead grandmother, I’d be pretty pissed.