Saskatoon writer James Avramenko didn’t want to be one of those people who “dramatically” declare they’re leaving Facebook.

To be sure, he is going to unfriend each of his nearly 600 Facebook friends, but not without personally telling each of them why.

Avramenko is phoning long-lost friends, old bosses, a groomsman, childhood pals and even an ex-bully to give them a heads up as to why they’re being “Facebook dumped,” he told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

These conversations can become “understandably awkward” but, with their permission, he’s been recording them and turning them into a podcast called “Friendless.”

“When you initially tell people you’re going to unfriend them, they can take it personally,” he said. “It’s taken as an insult like ‘why don’t you like me?’ But as soon as I tell them what I’m doing, those feelings melt away.”

It was about “wanting to get off Facebook in some capacity but also not wanting to lose touch with the people.”

He said he wanted to be more “mindful about the relationships I’m cultivating” because “I’m not seeing or speaking to the people I want to be … and I want to get back to talking to people.”

Avramenko admits he was partially inspired by some of his friends “dramatically” declaring they were leaving Facebook and laughs that “it’s not that I didn’t respect it but I always found it bizarrely confrontational.”

So he felt the personal touch was the way to go instead.


HOST: SCROLLING THROUGH FACEBOOK 'FORM OF VOYEURISM'

Despite Facebook’s initial promise when it was founded in 2004 of connecting family and long-lost friends, Avramenko believes the site has now become a source of both anxiety and “disconnectedness.”

“(It) has made us think that we’re more connected than we truly are -- it makes us think we’re interacting in a way that doesn’t actually exist,” he said, adding that if we think about it, our behaviours online are “kind of bizarre.”

“We mindlessly scroll through and look at people’s photos and think that we have somehow been in contact with them and we haven’t,” he said. “It’s sort of a form of voyeurism.”

But he didn’t always see Facebook as a superficial collection of connections devoid of “meaningful interactions.”

Avramenko lost touch with people as he and his wife moved from Calgary to Victoria to Vancouver to Saskatoon. And each time they did, he’s had to pick up his roots and replant them in completely new cities.

So early on, when he started his account in 2005, Facebook was a “blessing in maintaining these sort of pseudo-connections.”

But 14 years later, he realized he was spending more time scrolling through his newsfeed than actually knowing what’s going on with his “friends.”


TURNING RECONNECTIONS INTO 'FRIENDLESS' PODCAST

To deal with his Facebook identity crisis, he began reaching out to old friends earlier this year and recording his conversations. In July, one of those people he reached out to was Juno-award-winning fiddler Ben Plotnick who’d been his elementary school friend in Calgary.

They hadn’t spoken in close to 20 years. So when Avramenko called him, he was “caught up on the life that he lived and the adventures he’s had -- it was a really empowering thing.”

After awkwardly getting over the fact they hadn’t spoken for decades, they also laughed together, apologized for growing apart and bonded over conversation about their careers and reminiscenced of their school days.

“After all those years, we found things to relate to each other and that’s actually something I found magical,” he said of the call that became the basis for one of the first 30 episodes of his aptly-named podcast, “Friendless.”

“We were friends for ten years on Facebook and the first time I messaged was asking him to be on the podcast. We weren’t being friends to each other, we were (being) statistics to each other,” Avramenko said.

Other episodes have featured him “unfriending” his groomsman Matt Coulson, an old travelling companion and an ex-bully. Each of them, in one way or another, end up pledging to make more of an effort to keep up with each other in real life.

Finding a reason to take up podcasting was fortunate for Avramenko, who boasts a trained background in theatre, because he’s always looked for a reason to start one.

And now he gets to do it connecting with people he misses.

He hopes that 10 years from now, Facebook won’t exist. Although, Avramenko laughs that it could be replaced with something else as “a lot of the people I unfriend end up adding me on Instagram.”