Social media takes up a lot of time, but are we missing out on being social because of it? One Saskatoon man thinks so and it doing something about it.
James Avramenko is getting rid of his Facebook profile.
What makes it unique is he’s calling each of his 600 Facebook friends to give them a warning.
“Facebook is probably the longest-running behaviour that I perform every single day,” said Avramenko. “It’s a type of behaviour that I wanted to become more cognizant of and analyze what it means to behave this way every single day and what’s it doing to our relationships as a whole.”
When Avramenko calls the online friends and tells them he’s un-friending them, he asks if he can record the conversation and if he gets a ‘yes’ he puts them on his podcast.
He says that doesn’t mean they don’t keep in touch afterwards.
“The end goal is to speak to these individuals as the fascinating individuals they are,” said Avramenko. “Since un-friending I’ve started writing letters to one of my friends.”
“I think Facebook has a tendency to put us on autopilot. It lets us scroll by and look at somebody’s face and pretend like we’ve been in touch when we truly haven’t been,” he said.
Avramenko’s podcast is aptly named “Friendless.”