Unfollowing Ghosts: Navigating Social Media Connections

How do you separate people you used to know from people you DO know?

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I went through my instagram recently and unfollowed (almost) all the celebrities, clothing brands, semi-famous cats, defunct Lana del Rey fan accounts etc, but many of the ghost mutuals I wouldn’t have minded unfollowing were people I used to know. People I went to school with at any level, people I formerly worked with when I was an entirely different person living an entirely different life, housemates – or friends of housemates – I haven’t spoken to since I stopped living with them. I wish them well, and don’t need to know what their life updates are beyond what might be published in the paper – births, deaths, marriages, international successes, or foiled criminal aspirations. There’s a lot of people like that in my life, and surely in yours, too: we were never close, or maybe we were, or we may have spoken every day and shared a part of our lives that no longer exists. We may remember them with fondness, wistful sadness, nostalgia for a time we conducted ourselves differently and did different things. Would you go back to your young life were that possible? I would not, and I’ve burned a lot of bridges and felt a lot of hurt in the years since, with only social media to tell me less than half of the story of the consequences.

I think the only fair thing to do would be to unfollow everyone I’ve ever known (sorry mum, you’d get the can too under this regime) – or perhaps everyone I haven’t spoken to in the past 6 months – but that disregards the connection that you get from social media. The person I haven’t communicated with regularly since I worked with them in 2022 would, then, be entirely cut from my life, and I would no longer get the few small updates that would interest me, or their taste in film that I always respected, and would likely never see their smile again. To unfollow would deny that closeness is less the broad strokes of life (pregnancy announcements) and more the quotidian things that matter to the individual (sharing your half-finished novel, your stance on AI, or loving the same new tune I do), especially in an age of hyper-connection to parasocial figures. How many of these figures of my past are parasocial connections?

I wonder, sometimes, what you all think of me. In my clearout this week I found a notebook gifted to me over a decade ago by somebody I haven’t spoken to in all that time. Inside was a letter, an epigraph of love probably no longer felt from a person who probably no longer exists. I felt that mutual love so strongly that I could not throw the notebook away, even now, even knowing that I will not use it, even with the gifter no longer even on the periphery of my life. I am sentimental about writing, and handwriting especially. This person now has a new last name, so it took me a long time to find them, and their picture is from their wedding, years ago, which I wasn’t invited to. I didn’t message them. They probably don’t even know my new last name… but we loved each other once, and this artefact attests to it. Is it curiosity that keeps them following me, or a residual love? Is it social convention that keeps me on their feed, or do they just not use the app and haven’t done the digital de-clutter I just did? Over the years I have slowly become a different person, surely evident on my feed, until eventually subsuming my online identity into a sort-of business. The more personal accounts, like facebook, are deleted and gone; the more ‘online’ accounts with their own personality, like twitter, are gone too. Only things I think might serve my personal or professional aspirations remain, a testament to the modern world I am loath to live in more than an acknowledgement of the power and fun of the social media I grew up with. I am both incredibly open about my life on the internet, through personal essays exploring anything I think to write about, and deeply cagey, keeping my cards close to my chest and not sharing pictures or personal detail. It’s entirely plausible that these ‘people I used to know’, or even people I currently know, have disconnected my personhood from my online presence and don’t know who I am inside this mulberry-coloured shell. If you don’t think you know me IRL, why are you here? If you do know who I am offline, is this even remotely interesting to you? Are we still friends, based on a shared interest, or is ‘mutuals’ a category unto itself? Where do people I went to school with fit in with that? What about that one group chat of strangers that lasted 8 months but was personal, inspirational, and kept in constant communication?? What about family members who are told about me by other people, and I get told about them, but we only speak at somebody’s wedding???

There are no answers. The internet is reforming itself around us and I am attempting to practice intentionality in regards to my usage of it, but the truth is that life online is a reflection of how we live IRL, and life cannot be neatly segmented. Even as I try to make ‘online’ a smaller portion of my own path of living I find hurdles that make my thoughts more exploratory, thoughts that find themselves online, like this one. Will I even reply if anybody I referenced here messages me or comments?

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On This Topic:

• My peculiar list of celebrities who survived the Great Purge: Bernadette Banner, Mr Hudson, Rain Dove, Munroe Bergdorf, Donald Glover, Luisa Omielan, John Boyega, Kim-Joy, Maggie Rogers, Isabella Rossellini, Princess Nokia, Julia Lepetit, Nadiya Hussain, Rachel Syme, Kirsten Dunst, Aaron Tveit, Rebecca Hall, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dan Nigro, Eugene Lee Yang, Jamie Tworkowski, Anna Biller, Catherine Martin, Duffy, Lil Nas X, Rebecca Black, Taipei Queen, Venus Angelic, Lily Cole, Cora Harrington. It was sad to lose a lot of the small businesses that I’d been acquiring over the years, but I am never going to buy a pair of Georgian shoes or a bespoke hat, so I should stop coveting.
• Who do we turn to for social conventions in an online age? Debrett’s??
• It’s not just me with questions: here’s a paper from some Harvard researchers.

To-Do:

• CHECK-IN EMAIL!!!
• WBD follow-ups
• Eat the fancy mango I got as a gift. Do not fear the fancy mango.

Today’s Culture:

• It’s almost time to start a new OneNote for my ‘songs / poems / fragments’. I’ve started splitting them up by academic year because otherwise they get out of hand to search and scroll through.
• The cinema! I don’t come out of my study-hovel for just anything, but I’ve booked tickets to two upcoming BFI screenings and am glad they scheduled some things I can consider ‘unmissable’ (mainly it’s film-on-film that lures me, I am weak for a 35mm print)
• If you’d told me in 2007 that Brandon Flowers would make a country album I’d have told you to fuck off, but here it is, slap bang in the middle of 2026’s musical climate. Can we please bring back British folk, pop, and indie? It’s much more to my taste than all the country we’re seeing.