faKebook: the social lives of my imaginary friends
Thursday, 19 January 2012
My imaginary friend has sent out so many friends requests now that her pending friends requests limit has been reached. I have not been keeping track of how many this is (I wish I had!) but reckon its a 1:3 ratio approximately, so she has sent at least 150 requests. And she is posting status updates, status updates that I myself would, perhaps, post (with the odd detail changed) if I did actually share that much innane information on my `real' account. Why the inverted comma on 'real'? because I am not sure that any online identities are or can be real. Social networks are about selecting (or inventing) information in bits and presenting it to the group of people on a friends list (and maybe their friends, or maybe everyone). Can there ever be any truth?
Welcome to the world my imaginary friends!!!!!
Around two years ago I fell out with a person who had, up until that point, been a very close friend. She started ignoring my messages so I did what any normal person would do - I made a statement by deleting her of my facebook friends list. But I kep going back to check her profile was there until one day a short while after there was so, apparently, no such person on facebook. So I (again) did what any normal person would do and set up a fake facebook profile to check whether she had actually blocked me. She had.
Since then I have logged into the account twice - both to (again) see whether I had been blocked by someone or whether they had genuinely left facebook. At least it WAS twice, until a little over 24 hours ago something happened. I found out that someone I knew had, with the use of a (more established) fake profile, convinced three of my friends to allow them as friends in order to gather information about them through their posts/photos that they could then use to undermine my friendships with these people by undermining them through a discussion of their 'abhorant' activities for which evidence was presented in the form of status updates and photographs.
I felt quite violated at this - it was, after all, my links with people that was being undermined, and I felt like MY privacy had been invaded. And I was annoyed that my friends had accepted a friends request from someone they had never met onto their accounts that held loads of private information about them and, potentially, me.
So a little over twenty four hours ago I added a profile picture (downloaded from google images) and sent away a stream of friends requests (some to people I actually knew, mostly to people I didn't) to see what would happen. The image I chose was a female, several years younger than myself. I set her birthdate to eight years younger than myself and then decided to make it private anyway. I then thought that she needed a couple of friends to make her plausible so I set up two other accounts (I used hotmail to create new email addresses each time). I took another photo off of google for one of these, and created an avatar (from a dolly dress up application for the iphone) for the other.
Within the space of a day and a half, my imaginary friend now has 50 friends (52 if you count her two friends also created by me) thats already 50 people who have added a girl they have never met.
So do I feel bad about this deception? Yes I do.
Why I am writing this blog? Because I hope it will help me make sense of my own sense of identity and how it ties into the people I encounter in a real and virtual way. And because I am interested in the different ways that people use social network sites. I am hoping it will help me make sense of the violation of privacy I felt, as well as how I feel about this post post modern world in general.
Am I worried that my actual identity will be uncovered? A little - my seeminly random selection of friends is not random at all. I (actual me not imaginary me) have added certain people that only I could link together. But my suspicion is that no one will bother to look closely enough at my profile.
My aim - to see how long I can get 1000 friends on a completely fake profile, and I will you all informed about how this task is going.
Since then I have logged into the account twice - both to (again) see whether I had been blocked by someone or whether they had genuinely left facebook. At least it WAS twice, until a little over 24 hours ago something happened. I found out that someone I knew had, with the use of a (more established) fake profile, convinced three of my friends to allow them as friends in order to gather information about them through their posts/photos that they could then use to undermine my friendships with these people by undermining them through a discussion of their 'abhorant' activities for which evidence was presented in the form of status updates and photographs.
I felt quite violated at this - it was, after all, my links with people that was being undermined, and I felt like MY privacy had been invaded. And I was annoyed that my friends had accepted a friends request from someone they had never met onto their accounts that held loads of private information about them and, potentially, me.
So a little over twenty four hours ago I added a profile picture (downloaded from google images) and sent away a stream of friends requests (some to people I actually knew, mostly to people I didn't) to see what would happen. The image I chose was a female, several years younger than myself. I set her birthdate to eight years younger than myself and then decided to make it private anyway. I then thought that she needed a couple of friends to make her plausible so I set up two other accounts (I used hotmail to create new email addresses each time). I took another photo off of google for one of these, and created an avatar (from a dolly dress up application for the iphone) for the other.
Within the space of a day and a half, my imaginary friend now has 50 friends (52 if you count her two friends also created by me) thats already 50 people who have added a girl they have never met.
So do I feel bad about this deception? Yes I do.
Why I am writing this blog? Because I hope it will help me make sense of my own sense of identity and how it ties into the people I encounter in a real and virtual way. And because I am interested in the different ways that people use social network sites. I am hoping it will help me make sense of the violation of privacy I felt, as well as how I feel about this post post modern world in general.
Am I worried that my actual identity will be uncovered? A little - my seeminly random selection of friends is not random at all. I (actual me not imaginary me) have added certain people that only I could link together. But my suspicion is that no one will bother to look closely enough at my profile.
My aim - to see how long I can get 1000 friends on a completely fake profile, and I will you all informed about how this task is going.
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