New Stalker on the Block
By doing a Garfinkle experiment, I’ve reaffirmed what I’ve internally believed to be true, and that I’ve only more recently started to observe: Breaking social norms is very challenging. For the uninformed, a Garfinkle experiment calls on the observationist to identify and breach an unspoken social norm. Ah, well that doesn’t sound too scary to do just once or twice, right? The reason why I chose to describe the experience as very challenging as opposed to simply weird or difficult was because of my history grappling with my mental illnesses. My most recent struggle has led me to experience the shame of breaking many social norms at once. Now that I’ve recovered, a prescription that I’ve found has helped me to take baby steps coping with life afterwards has been to try to adhere to social norms whenever possible. Baym’s take on how social norms function in group settings is that becoming a group insider involves a process of being socialized to norms and values so that they guide one’s communication without having to be considered” (Page 88). Being a group insider has never been a goal of mine because I value my independence and individuality, but I can say in recent years since my diagnosis, paying
closer attention to social norms has helped me tremendously with feelings that I no longer fit in. These circumstances are the reason why, in reading the list of Garfinkle’s experiments, my stomach lurched a bit, and I felt a little nauseous. Could I really do this? TL;DR, I did. I was hoping this would serve as a nice reminder to me and others why social norms prevent bad interactions. Turns out this hypothesis was wrong, and sometimes they just don’t matter.
As I began to set up my experiment from Sandvig’s list of Garfinkle experiments, I recognized that the list was old and not updated since being posted in 2011. I could see it would be problematic if the social norms to be breached on the page are old and no longer relevant to today’s social media sites. So I took a page from Sandvig’s post and decided that all new[er] Garfinkle’s are welcome (Sandvig). The Garfinkle experiment I settled on is called the picture stalker, an experiment that I found breaks the norm of respecting privacy and boundaries by not creeping [Marwick]. The procedure I took was to go through an instagram profile, and over a three day period I wrote positive comments on 15 posts older than six months, while checking back after the period to see if anyone else has commented on the posts afterwards.
After singling out my subject, I began selecting the posts. The method I took was as efficiently random as possible. As I scrolled their 170 posts on my phone every couple hours, I stopped wherever my finger landed, assuring that I did not stop on too many similar pictures like selfies, and wrote a positive comment about the post. I kept a log listing each post I commented on with a description of the post, the date posted, and my comment. I tried to keep my comments consistently relevant to what was occurring in the post. I’m not going to list them all because I do not want to out the person’s profile, but here’s a few from the list:
- To a picture of the person working out from February 2015, with a caption that they leg pressed 810 lbs, I commented complemented their form.
- A picture of the person’s dog with it’s mouth wide open from May 2015 with no caption received my comment about how cute the dog was.
- Their picture of a bottle used for protein shakes from May 2017, with a caption describing how they finally got around to cleaning the mold out of it, got a comment about how that happens with my bottles too and that it’s cool that they got around to cleaning it.
After starting the Garfinkle experiment, inexplicably, I did not feel nearly as challenged as I did at first. Don’t get me wrong, it was still weird. After the first comment my thought process shifted from, “What a pain” to “Might as well follow through.” It was actually interesting to see this window into that person’s world.
So, how did this all end? Well, after the three days, I didn’t get a response. To any of my comments. No one else commented after any of mine either. What takeaways could be yielded from nothing? Looking back to Baym for answers, her theory that “normative standards always implicate power structures” (Page 90), may be the reason for this. I wonder if the person I chose as my subject is non-normative. They live on an island in a rural part of the country, and belong to a community that prides itself on connecting to what’s important. Perhaps picture stalking is not an egregious breach or a series of comments to old pictures don’t trigger any sense of broken norms for them. Or perhaps they have better things to worry about amidst a national pandemic. Baym talks about there being a temporal norm for social media posts. It’s possible the pandemic has broken whatever norms exist. Whatever the case, what I can conclude is that after doing the Garfinkle experiment I’ve now realized that breaking some norms isn’t as conspicuous as I once feared, especially during an international pandemic.
Works Cited
Baym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Polity, 2018.
Marwick, Alice. “Social Media Norm Breaching Experiments.” 2018. Retrieved from http://www.tiara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Norm-Breaching-Experiment-Spr18.pdf
Sandvig, Christian. “The Oversharer (and Other Social Media Experiments).” Social Media Collective, 29 Jan. 2014, socialmediacollective.org/2011/07/29/the-oversharer-and-other-social-media-experiments/.
