In the Facebook sense, "unfriend" is a verb, as is "friend." To friend someone is to, well, add him to your social media network, make him your friend. To unfriend him, therefore, means you're telling him to stuff it. It means a Facebook divorce is in the works.
Like in high school, the number of friends you have is all-important, and popularity is the coin of the realm. If you play the social media game correctly, then, you'll have friends numbering in the thousands.
My thought: Who has that many friends?
Simple. "Friend" is diluted to the point it means nothing.
I never could get my brain wrapped around that aspect of social media. I guess I define "friend" as something different than the average Facebook or Myspace user does.
Now, in Twitter you have followers. OK. That makes sense. I may follow a band, I may follow the works of a writer, but it's pretty presumptuous to say we're friends. And it's just as easy to unfollow (yes, that has suddenly become a word) someone as it is to follow him.
To give an idea of how cheap friends are these days, my own Twitter account has about 140 followers. Which on one hand sounds like a lot, but in Twitter it's pretty paltry. And quite a few of these followers are not people I'd care about. Some would not be allowed in my house. But that's OK. They're just reading my musings, not having dinner with me.
To "unfriend" someone has got to mean something. Or maybe not. You'd have to do something really bad to be unfriended, unless the unfriending one is merely purging the friend roll. But since the number is so important, why would he want to do that?
I have a group of friends that get together once or twice a week for dinner. Guitars and keyboards will come out at some point during our get-togethers, and we'll do a little living-room picking. We do things as a group -- camping trips and things like that. We discuss what's bugging us, and we watch one another's tails in this mean ole world. Now, these are friends.
Then there are payday friends. These are the folks who turn up right after you get paid, and they always seem to want something. When they get paid, you never see them.
Now you have Facebook friends. Individually they mean nothing; it's the number that's important. But despite my criticism, social media is cool anyway. Some folks I've "met" that way have graduated to become actual flesh-and-blood friends. Nothing wrong with that.
Social media and our plugged-in world gave us a few other "words" that merited attention from the Oxford editors:
Hashtag - Also known as #hashtag in Twitterese. That's a function that brings a little organization to the overloaded morass that is Twitter. Tweeters will inject a hashtag to make it searchable, so one can build a live feed. Unfortunately, there's no set standard there, and not everyone uses these tags. If I wanted to do a search or feed of posts dealing with all the disorganized crap that's on that microblogging service, I can use #twitteranarchy. Or not.
Sexting - You've probably heard about this; where young people -- too young to really think about stuff like that -- send photos of a sexual nature to others via cell phone. Usually photos of themselves, thereby cheapening themselves even more than before.
Paywall - A for-pay subscription to something online, like a newspaper. You can only get so far into one of these sites, and to get past the paywall you need to dig out the credit card again.
Here are some more, from Oxford University Press:
Economy
freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content
funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests
zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support
Politics and Current Affairs
Ardi – (Ardipithecus ramidus) oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced to the public in 2009
birther – a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s birth certificate
choice mom – a person who chooses to be a single mother
death panel – a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed
teabagger -a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)
Environment
brown state – a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations
green state – a US state that has strict environmental regulations
ecotown - a town built and run on eco-friendly principles
Novelty Words
deleb – a dead celebrity
tramp stamp – a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman
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