Every now and then, something pops up in my Facebook newsfeed that really catches my eye and occupies my thoughts for a while. Last week it was the video of the Harvard baseball team dancing to “Call Me Maybe” in the car (the guy sleeping in the back seat is my favorite), and on Sunday it was the article from The New York Times Magazine that was titled “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?” an unnerving and well-written piece. The other day, however, it was actually someone’s Facebook status that caught my eye.

One of my Facebook friends had written a status that read, “Just finished cleaning out my Facebook friends list. If you’re reading this status, then congratulations, you made the cut!” It had garnered over 30 likes and got me thinking: how does one go about a Facebook cleanse?

The first step is obvious: going through your current friends list and unfriending those who you don’t know in real life — although, to be fair, I don’t know why anyone would add those people as friends in the first place. The next thing would be to delete those individuals you have only met once or twice. Easy enough. But then what happens next? Do you start with the people you knew in high school but no longer talk to? What about old co-workers? And how about that one girl you once worked on an IHUM project with, because your TF paired you up, but haven’t talked to since? Does she deserve to survive your purge?

A late night discussion with some friends led to some interesting thoughts on the topic. One friend of mine insists on keeping his friend list limited to about 200 people. He believes that that number represents the amount of people he actively interacts with at any given time. He argued that he knows he doesn’t need to delete anyone, and that he knows this because he feels comfortable writing on the walls of any one of his friends, and has done so at some point or another.

Another friend, who has over 1,000 Facebook friends, told me that she is completely comfortable with her social network. According to her, you never know when those old connections might come in handy, and her only stipulation is that she only adds individuals she has met in real life (well, that and she refuses to add her parents). She insists that she doesn’t put anything up on Facebook that she has a problem with anyone seeing, so it doesn’t make a difference to her.

In addition to the act of cleansing, there’s also the question of how to deal with the aftermath of deleting a Facebook friend. If you choose to delete people you once knew in high school, what happens when you run into them back home during breaks? One person argued that you merely smile and gesture hello, but that there’s no need for further acknowledgement. “After all,” my friend argued, “if she wanted me to know about her life in college, she would have stayed my Facebook friend.” The fact that she was offended by the deletion wasn’t masked very well.

Now, even though I gave my friend a sympathetic smile at the time, her words led me to an entirely different realization: people take Facebook way too seriously nowadays. We are all aware that Facebook is not real life, yet the idea that things need to be made “Facebook official” appears to have consumed our generation. We feel the need to wish people we would never wish in real life a “Happy Birthday” because the site tells us to; we share our relationship statuses with the world, regardless of whether we’re sharing information about a hook-up or a breakup, and we get offended when we get unfriended. I’m as guilty of it as everyone else is, but it’s important to remember that our Facebook friendships don’t validate our real ones. At the end of the day, Facebook is nothing more than a public forum where some people choose to share tidbits of their life and others choose to share the “Call Me Maybe” music video, and taking something like that seriously may be as ridiculous as the aforementioned music video.

Want to call Ravali maybe? Send her an email first at ravreddy “at” stanford “dot” edu.