Facebook Friend or Stalker

I love Facebook, it’s free, it’s simple, it allows me to keep in touch with family and friends (both ‘real’ and virtual) wherever they are in the world. Yes, it gets a bit full of adverts occasionally – but I have found a cool Add-In called AdBlockPlus that will block most of them as well as allowing configuration of lots of other potentially irritating features of FB. FB don’t like it and keep trying to get in it’s way, but so far ABP have managed to keep ahead of the programmers employed by Mark Zuckerberg, so give it a go.

So I use FB regularly, it is always on in both my phone and my laptop, I post several times a day and read my ‘Friends’ posts at a similar frequency. I rarely think about the consequences of my posts, having already paid a lot of attention to who I accept as a Friend, who I include in the various audiences allowed to read my posts, what I post etc… I work on the basis that, despite my best efforts, everything I post will probably be available to anyone with sufficient expertise anyway and so avoid posting photos of various bits of genitalia or being gratuitously offensive.

But a recent conversation has got me thinking about those ‘Friends’, one of who has admitted to reading posts but never posting anything themselves. My first, and admittedly rather extreme, thoughts were that this practice is in the same territory as stalking and that I would UnFriend the individual. Clearly it is not stalking, but I’m still very uneasy about someone who sucks stuff in about others’ lives but never gives anything out. How would I respond if a physical friend spent their whole time listening to my conversations, looking at my photos without ever speaking themselves or showing off their own family snaps? How long would I keep accepting that person into my house or inviting them to the pub? Would I question their motives for the apparent friendship? Isn’t friendship about a mutual exchange of information?

One part of me is interested in what lies behind this behaviour, another part thinks that even if I knew, what would I do with that insight and would it make any difference to how I feel?

So what would YOU do in these circumstances and why? I would really value your insights into the situation – please comment below. I promise I will share all comments (unless you specifically ask me not to).