Tax day! Better have those done :)
On to class material...
As I said in class today I want you to create a fake profile on Facebook. Go nuts, completely make someone up, add a fake photo(s), etc. Make sure your fakester is different than you in either gender or race. Interact with people. Get people to friend you. Be as mysterious and wacky as you want to be...nothing illegal please (e.g., no threats to public safety).
When you are done with this please blog about your experience.
Who did you decide to be? Why? What are they all about? What kind of feedback did you receive? Did you feel creepy doing this, why? Etc.
MAKE SURE YOUR NEW FRIEND SENDS ME A FRIEND REQUEST!!! I need to see the finished product!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
59 friends in less than 24 hours!!!!!! I really never thought it would be that easy to "make friends". At first i named my fictional person Michelle Smith, because I thought it would be a good idea to use a common last night, but then i decided to try using a not as common last name. I made up the last name Housuer (don't ask me why). Once I created the facebook it showed me a list of people who i might want to be friends with since they are in my network which was originally Urbana, IL. (ooh i just got another friend so now 60!). I friended a couple of the people that were given in that list. I then went and made my information based off some of my other friends. I used a picture without a face, just a hand making the peace sign. Once some random person, I think his name was Alex, accepted me as his friend I went an friended a bunch of his friends with the assumption that if they saw I knew Alex and they knew Alex they might accept. Which worked out better than i expected. I friended my roomate, but he realized it was me when i left the room and he saw my new "person" on my laptop. He found the whole assignment to be funny and gave me a list of people to friend that he thought were "stupid" enough to accept. He then offered to be in a relationship with this imaginary person, and i couldn't reject the offer. I went a friended a lot of my roomates friends assuming that they would accept based on the fact that he was dating her. Only one person wrote on my wall "How do i know u?" i deleted that wall post and sent the person a fb message "I don't know u i meant to friends someone else sorry". I kept friending the people that fb kept suggesting me to friend, finally fb gave me a warning basically saying that i was friending people to fast and it is suspicious behavior and if continued could lead to my fb being blocked. Seeing that made me feel a little bit safer knowing that fb does pick up on people that go on extreme friending streaks. One of the things I did notice was that the ads that came up were more focused for a girl and were defiantly ads I have never seen before on my own facebook. Another thing i noticed is that ten of the people i friended are all attending "Kristen's graduation party". Which makes me think that some of those people accepted the friend request because they saw that I had several friends in common with them. Doing this defiantly will make me think twice before I accept a friend request next time I get one. When i was accepting people I felt really creepy becoming "friends" with these random people that I have never met. Once I was friends with them I could see all this information and pictures of this person even though they have no clue who I am and I have no clue who they are.
87 friends in a little over 24 hours :) I am a little amazed that Rich Johnson could have that many friends who have never met the guy. I think that there is a definite domino effect, when people decide to accept a friend request from someone they don't know. The first few people to accept the request were also my friends; I think that seeing friends in common with a person makes them more willing to also accept their friendship. Especially because I'm not someone with a ridiculous amount of superfluous facebook friends. I have told a handful of my friends about it, but only after interrogating them, why they would friend this guy that they were pretty sure they didn't know. Most of them said that he looked like he could be familiar, and it was easier to friend him and try to figure out who he was after he got some more pictures up, than to deny his friend request and risk offending someone.
Today, out of the blue, one of my friends asked a group of us if anyone knew who Rich Johnson was. I stayed quiet and listened to everyone else laugh about his name (first and last name are nicknames for the penis... didn't even notice that!) and theorize about where they might know him from. One of them said that he had recommended that he friend Johnny Walker, and found that amusing and strange.
I've gotten one person who wrote on my wall asking me where they knew me, and 6 similar messages. One person, who is not in on the game, wrote "who is this? a cousin of Andrew Carnegy?"
After recently reading all the articles about the Somali Pirates on the other side of the world, I decided to create Scurvy Bones Chase the Pirate. He is 32 years old, a graduate with a bachelors degree in Business Administration and is a pirate who now Facebooks in his free time.
For his information page, I decided to stick to the stereotypical pirate and put things that one would expect from a pirate (interests: women, rum, guns, parrots, wooden legs...favorite movies: muppet treasure island...etc...). I also decided to use real pictures of the Somali pirates to give it a somewhat realistic feel. This may be why I didn't get many friends from this experiment.
However, some people did accept my friend request which gave me an in with other people the knew since it is easier to friend someone you don't know if you already have friends in common with them.
I think my name being 'scurvy bones chase' took some of the realism out my fake account, but I had fun doing it. One guy who friended me immediately sent me a pirate application request to join his crew. I thought that was funny and in good humor.
I received other responses including messages saying things to the effect of "who is this?".
I really did not feel creepy doing this mainly because I didn't know any of these people and I knew this was for fun. It is interesting that I can see lots of information on the people who did friend me. If you trust everyone on Facebook, it is really easy for your privacy to be compromised.
Post a Comment