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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