Challenging Social Media Norms
When we learned about the idea of social norms and hidden rules that sociologist Harold Garfinkel came forward with in 1967, I knew that I had to try to apply this to social media. This would be the best way to explore these different ideas without putting a ton of effort and time forward. Over the past few days, I have been conducted various social media experiments on a few of my friends. I haven’t had a lot of time to try out all of the different variations of them, but I have had success with a select few of them.
The first method that I attempted was “mixing media”. I spent the largest amount of time on this one and I probably enjoyed this more than any of the other experiments. The basis of mixing media is to send someone a message or “PM” on a certain social media platform such as SMS, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and reply to their responses on a different one. This actually took a decent amount of time, as I had to find people that frequented more than three different platforms and would actually respond to me once I switched platforms. The result of this experiment was inconclusive, as I got a 50/50 split on people responding between platforms.
I found out that if I led with a question or interesting topic, people would be interested and continue the conversation across platforms. For example, I texted my friend Spike (yes that’s his name) and asked if he could do me a HUGE favor? I also asked my cousin Mitch if he still planned on coming up for Pig Roast, which is an event that is held by the Rugby team here at Juniata. The results varied as expected. Spike replied and we continued the conversation across SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I will say that it was kind of biased, as I asked him some very thought provoking and deep questions. I can’t even imagine what was going through his head! Mitch on the other hand responded to my initial question via SMS, and when I continued the conversation on Twitter and Instagram, he defaulted back to SMS without questioning anything about my methods. I later found that he no longer has Twitter, but saw the messages via email. Two people voiced their confusion about what was going on, while two others didn’t reply at all.
I also tried oversharing, but I did this through SMS and PMs instead of actually posting publicly. I asked two people a question and when they responded, I gave every detail that I could humanly think about. This messed with people a lot more, as they had zero idea what was going on. To put this into context, I asked a friend about if he had seen a Snapchat that one of our other friends was pictured in, but I provided details such as the time I saw it, exactly what I was wearing, and the usernames of the Snapchat users instead of just their names. He was mind-boggled and asked if this was a joke, which I finally caved and told him about the experiment.
Through doing these experiments, I’ve learned that depending on the person and the content, the responses for challenging these norms differed. My closest friends played along, but they were also the ones to call me out when things got too crazy or absurd. Meanwhile, the others either didn’t respond or replied to one messaged and questioned what I was doing. Overall, it was a pretty fun thing to do and I would love to try this in different settings such as at a party on a weekend to get people in some different scenarios.
