Thank You for Accepting my Friend Request

Over this past weekend, I attempted an experiment from Christian Sandvig’s The Oversharer (and Other Social Media Experiments). After much pondering over which experiment to partake in, I decided on #4 The Facebook Wall Inquisitor. My job was to friend 5 new people on Facebook and post a long series of conversation and question to their wall as soon as they accept my friend request. The experiment was a little daunting at first, as the idea of 5 new, random strangers being on my friends list was not a simple task for me. I began looking through my suggested friends list only to realize that i semi-knew most of the people on there. So I selected 8 people who go (or went) to Juniata College as a way to get a conversation going. I sent the requests on Friday and waited until I had 5 new friends to begin the experiment.

I did not get my fifth confirmed friend unit late Saturday afternoon (I had 4 almost immediately after sending them out). But once that fifth friend came along, I was ready to start sending long intrusive messages to people’s walls. I went in order of acceptance by starting out each of the messages with “Hello. Thanks for accepting my friend request. As you can see my name is Zach.” I wanted to stay rather informal, but to introduce myself to not seem extremely weird. I would then go on to ask questions about their jobs, their college majors, and other comments on photos or posts. It was honestly quite fun to just ramble on and on to them as quickly as I could type. That made it interesting just to see how quickly the ideas would flows.

I got very excited to see the responses I was getting to these posts, almost as excited as my Fake News post from last month. I was hesitant to look at the responses (expecting them the be negative and questioning), but the first ones I saw were very nice and tried to answer my questions as best they could. Out of the 5 posts, I received 2 honest responses, a reply with three emojis, and two no responses. I have posted the responses below.

I think all of these experiments are fun to try for yourself. They let you test the boundaries of what is acceptable on social media platforms such as Facebook. I never would do this outside of an experiment, so it was nice to see what can happen when you try something like this. If you are interested in these experiments, they can be found here: https://socialmediacollective.org/2011/07/29/the-oversharer-and-other-social-media-experiments/.