I just spent about 20 minutes pruning my buddy list and the numbers in my phone. I managed to drop a good chunk of the list due to out of date contact info. In other cases, they are contacts that were old clients or old leads that I have no need to keep in touch with since I’m starting school.
Looking at the remaining list of names in my phone, I see people I know I’m never going to call. I should remove them, but I don’t. Their presence lets me delude myself into believing that there’s still some sort of bond between us. Maybe some days I scroll past one of their names, and I think, “Oh, I could call so and so,” and that simple thought makes me feel that they’re still in my life.
Buddy lists are a different beast. There’s rarely any incentive to prune a buddy list. Mine has only undergone one major pruning a few years ago when I did a mass Opium/Pit purge (for those that weren’t members, Opium and the Pit were the mailing lists for Jump, Little Children and Ben Folds Five). I’d accumulated a few dozen screennames, many of whom I only spoke to once or twice. Now only four of them remain.
Given the amount of time I spent in front of my computer, it’s not surprising that how well I keep in touch with a given friend is directly related to how much they are online. There are people I went to high school with who I barely spoke to, and I happened to get their screenname after they went to college and all of a sudden they became some of my closest friends. There are others who I thought I’d never fall out of touch with, but now it has happened. Apparently picking up a phone is way too much effort for me.
So if you’re reading this and I don’t have your screenname, send it to me. If you don’t have a screenname, go get one and send it to me.
