That time I made all my friends hate me

For my social experiment, I chose to mix my media for a few days. Every time someone messaged me, I would respond to them on a different platform.

Some of my friends, especially those I don’t interact with every day, just ignored it. Maybe because I mess with their heads so often, when I try to do things like this it doesn’t really seem all that unusual to them. When they did react, though, mostly they were just really confused.

This was the reaction most of my friends had. They either thought I’d done it by accident, or they thought I was playing a joke on them.

Some of them were understandably annoyed.

I found out that one of my friends apparently doesn’t even have my number saved.

By the end of the 3 days, I ended up telling everyone about the experiment. While none of them were angry about it exactly, it was clear that I was beginning to annoy them. I found out that my friends apparently have a reasonable amount of tolerance for my nonsense, which probably says more about me than it does about them.

In her book, Baym discussed how digital communication has social cues specific to the format and how that communication was very nuanced. As such, digital communication carries it’s own set of rules and expectations. What I did broke those expectations and my friends reacted accordingly: with great confusion, annoyance, maybe even a little disgust.

I found it extremely interesting that, even though there are no rules to social media, they all agreed that it was very strange that I was interacting with them like this. Maybe it would have been better if I did it more sporadically, perhaps by holding a conversation on one platform for a few minutes before switching to another. That might have made it less obvious that I was trying to mess with their heads and get a reaction.

Doing this really made me think about how social media works and the unspoken rulebook associated with them. It did not initially occur to any of them that I could be doing this on purpose. It was a mistake, or a joke, because certainly nobody would ever do this on purpose.