It seems a product of the halcyon dot-com days of cheery offices filled with ping-pong tables and Razor scooters, but Facebook is inherently cheery. Everyone you know is by default your friend, and your only option for emoting is to "like" something. When the service is indisputably part of many of our lives – and has a consistent record of getting us to put more of our lives online – what are the effects of living an online lie where we’re unable to dislike anything?It’s a question shared by a lot of people, as evidenced by the 3.3 million people signed up for a petition to get a dislike button. But even a dislike button seems rather pithy, doesn’t it? What if I want to organize the people I don’t like?Dean Terry, the director of the emerging media program at the University of Texas at Dallas, has made Facebook enemies a reality. According to a profile by Jeffrey Young for The Chronicle, Terry developed a plug-in called EnemyGraph that allows users to name their enemies. From the piece:The programming stunt might win Mr. Terry some real enemies among people who think the best thing about Facebook is its relative lack of negativity. After all, many online forums are prone to vicious flame wars that lead reasonable people to steer clear. What’s wrong with keeping an online world like Facebook nice?
To Mr. Terry, that’s where his role as an educator comes in. “What we all do in the program is help our students think critically about social media,” he says, noting that that is the main goal of EnemyGraph. “On Facebook you’re the product—it’s commoditized expression,” he argues, and he wants students and others to recognize that. “I’m not telling students not to use it, I’m just telling them to understand what’s happening when they use it.”
A graduate research assistant, Bradley Griffith, did the actual coding, and he made an even stronger case for the service than Mr. Terry did. “It’s dangerous for us as a society to move in this direction where everything has its worst qualities removed from it,” Mr. Griffith told me.One can’t fault Facebook for trying to keep its network positive. With the massive problem that is cyberbulling, and the wealth of filth that shows up anyway, adding the ability to declare someone your enemy online does seem unnecessarily baiting of bad behavior. At the same time, it does provide an ethical and philosophical quandary: The more our online lives become the same as our analog ones, it seems fake to simply block out all the bad stuff.I, for one, don’t much care for the lengthy emotional rants that pop up in my news feed from time to time. But that’s what keeps the service honest. I guess I tend to look at it this way: As our own personas slowly merge into our Facebook ones, I don’t want to become some sort of filtered, censored, résumé-ready version of myself, and I wouldn’t want my friends — or frenemies — to either.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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