The social web gave us rituals for connection, but it also gave us quieter, more complex rituals for disconnection. Words like unfriending, unfollowing, or shadowbanning are not in any user manual; they are the folk terms we created to describe the act of curating our digital lives.
Unfriending—the Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2009—is perhaps the most potent of these. It is not a loud confrontation, but a silent, deliberate act of removal. It is the quiet click of a digital door closing.
This artifact, unfriending.im, is an interactive monument to that ritual. The constellation begins complete, a network of established bonds. By clicking on a connection, you are re-enacting that quiet click, and for a moment, making the constellation a little sparser, a little more silent.
(click anywhere to close)