Authors

INTRODUCTION
Defriendocalypse. Courtesy of Urban Dictionary I came upon this phrase while looking up the word "defriend." The word "unfriend" made it into the Oxford Dictionary in 2009 and was chosen as word of the year. (It beat out words like hashtag (sorry, Twitter) and sexting – both worthy opponents that were also added that year.)

Defriendocalypse. I myself have as it says "unwittingly survived" several of these epic list modifications. Statuses regularly update me of such luck. I have also sat beside friends while they clean house of hundreds of friends. This process always seemed interesting to me, but I knew I would have a hard time deciding who should stay and who should go. (If I was honest with myself, half of the people who kept me during their sweep would have not survived my own efforts.)

It wasn't until I was in conversation with friends about wishing people "Happy Birthday" (or in my signature way: h a p p y b i r t h d a y !) that lightning struck (not really, but that makes it sound like it was a really brill idea, no?). If I don't even want to wish someone something so simply as "Happy Birthday" online, what business do we have being friends.

After sharing this idea with my friend Kathy, she decided to join me in this exercise.

KATHY + ERICA = KATICA
'Ello! So, this portion is no longer the introduction to our blog, but an introduction to the authors – hence the authors page (I know, we're clever). Together, we are Katica (for the main purpose of sharing equal access to the blog and its many features). Separately, well, we're getting to that.

Kathy
Between the two of us, we started this year with about 1160 friends, and only about 50 of those in common. That means that over 1100 people don't know one of the two of us writing this blog. So we thought we'd introduce ourselves.

Hi! I'm Kathy. I'm the snarky one. I'm ok with being a little mean and certainly am blunt, but I hope you enjoy this blog more as a comment on the ways our society interacts than as any sort of personal attack on the people we defriend. I'll probably be saying adios to a lot of people since I'm starting the year with 710 friends exactly and I certainly don't have that many close buds. A little about my past: I went to high school in small-town Illinois, and made a plethora of "friends" along the way through school, theatre, jobs, and the camp I worked at. Last year I came to college at Mizzou, where I ran into Erica as a part of our jobs. I'm excited to be embarking upon this resolution/quest/mission and am certainly open for questions and comments. Enjoy reading!

Erica

Simple introduction: 

I completed highschool in an even smaller town in Iowa (win!) and am currently completing my last year of college at Mizzou. I also have accumulated several "friends" throughout the years; and while contemplating the results of this exercise, I anticipate that I will have less than half of the friends that I started out with. [This is apparently a bad thing, as a rule of thumb is not to have more pictures on facebook than friends (but, I have been breaking this rule for some time now).] Ah, and it is me selfishly over-using the word "I" in the introduction (my apologies).