Breaching Social Norms
Every social media experiment was unique in their own way. After reading through all of them the two that I wanted to test were “The Oversharer” and “Always Mix Media” These two stood out to me because I felt like I would be able to test a couple of my friends and my father for one of them. All of the other experiments were still very interesting, but I felt like I would be able to test these the best.
The first one I did was “Always Mix Media” and I tested this with two of my friends. The first friend sent me a message over iMessage, and I replied with a social media dm. For the second friend, it was the exact opposite. He sent me an Instagram post of a pair of shoes and I responded how cool they looked over iMessage. The second experiment I did was “The Oversharer” and I tested this with my father. I sent him texts like, “Going to tennis”, “Editing my mass media project”, and “Sitting on a picnic table”.
I wasn’t expecting certain reactions from my friends, but I knew what type of reaction I would get from my father because I know him fairly well. The first reaction I got from my friend she said in the Instagram dm was “Is your iMessage not working?” and I said, “No it is”. After that, she was questioning my every move and then gave up talking to me because she was annoyed. The first message from my second friend on iMessage was just as normal as ever. He didn’t even notice anything unusual. We were having a normal conversation all afternoon until he said, “Why are you texting me every dm response lmaooo”. I then told him it was an experiment. He said, “It’s like you’re whispering to me”. I found this very funny. I got the exact reaction that I assumed I would from my father and that was “R u ok”. It literally didn’t even phase him. I mean he’s getting older now and more oblivious. If I did this experiment with my mother, she would’ve said something. In Ch. 6 of Personal Connections, Baym views that, “Much of what people do on SNSs is share. Many platforms instruct users to share your life and equate sharing with caring”. I find this “sharing” very universal among a variety of social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook. The platforms want you to share your life with others or share products or services with your friends.
These experiments revealed that norms within different settings are not always similar. Communication norms can be creating a sense of eye contact while talking with someone, being informal in our approach to others, and valuing the ideas of others. Being said communication norms are not always kind or genuine especially on social media and how parts of communication norms on social media are almost obsolete. Social media can be formal, but it is mostly informal in the way we interact with other users. What I find interesting about social media norms and technology norms is that we are so used to talking to and trusting strangers over the internet. Whether on apps such as Uber to dating apps like Tinder. We are constantly conversing with strangers on a daily basis. One of the biggest norms on social media I see on Instagram is when you break up with someone and they delete every photo of you together on their account. In Ch. 6 Baym states that, “After breaking up, some people may stop using a medium entirely in order to avoid another person. Others worry about how their messages on a site will be read by their ex-partner or stalk their former partners’ profiles in efforts to better understand the reasons for their breakup”. Overall, I found these experiments very interesting because I never knew a lot about social media norms or how any of these norms could relate to one another. How social media is like a new form of communication that a lot of people are so used to using and that there are specific rules that every user adapts to or follows.
