"UNFRIENDING" THE DEAD

IT IS that time of the year again when we remember our beloved dead. At this exact moment, a realization strikes me: my Facebook friends who have crossed over into the Great Beyond still remain on my Friends List.

It is incredibly easy to bid them a final goodbye. With just the click of a button next to their name, they are gone. Yet, that is something I have never done. Nor have I ever skidded through my list to deliberately start deleting people—whether they are inactive users, those pesky individuals who love to share troll-inspired misinformation and fake news, or those I haven't seen in so long that I have forgotten why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Perhaps I am simply too busy to bother, rarely spending enough time on Facebook to justify overhauling my account to root out obsolete connections. Or perhaps, I feel deeply ill at ease with the word "unfriend," especially in the case of my wife, who passed away in 2011. I like to think I honor her by remembering the good times we shared, and by treasuring what she left behind for me and our family

5 YEARS OF FACEBOOKING

IT WAS December 22, 2008, when I opened my Facebook account at the invitation of Arlyn, a law school classmate. This was more than four years after Mark Zuckerberg and his peers first introduced the online social networking service to their fellow Harvard students. A day after my name and ID photo cropped up in a blue-and-white corner of cyberspace, my cousin Danny Cadorna—whom I had not seen since he left for Japan in 1994—sent me my first-ever friend request. Soon, other relatives, friends, former classmates, coworkers, and even strangers requested to join my friends list. They say that most people who know how to use a computer and the internet have a Facebook profile. Unsurprisingly, in just a short span, my notifications swelled with requests to connect, play games, join groups, and "like" various pages.