Facebook Experiment

This post is a bit of a blast from the past, but nonetheless, here we go.

We were talking in class quite a while ago about how Facebook establishes legitimacy with what’s going on in people’s lives. People begin to rely on Facebook on Facebook profiles to figure out what’s going on in people’s lives. So I decided to try something out to test how powerful the medium really is.

I changed my relationship status to “in a relationship” for 24 hours and kept track of the types of responses I got. I’ll not that I only have about 300 “friends” on Facebook.

Comments: 12

People that “liked” it: 10

Texts/Phonecalls: 11

Personal message on facebook: 2

People that made reference in person: 3

People that talked to me about it on Facebook chat: 15

I was surprised that I had that many responses in a period of about 24 hours. And what surprised me even more was that so many people actually believed it was real, including some of my best friends I talk to at least a few times a week. Most of the responses via computer (comments, chat messages, etc.) were pretty simple. Examples are, “Congratulations, who is the lucky lady?” and “Yay!” but the responses I got through text messages and phone calls were much more personal and detailed. A couple of people were even mad at me for not telling them sooner!

In the end, I think what I did proved that Facebook is a powerful medium. I received 53 different responses about a completely bogus circumstance in a day’s time. Without that post, I probably would have only had contact with a handful of the people that responded over the course of the next week, and I would say that dozens of other people saw the status even if they didn’t comment on it or respond in any way.