About Us

Facelife: The Social Network Social Experiment was a project performed by six Digital Technology and Culture students at Washington State University Vancouver in the Spring of 2009. The overall goal of the experiment was to analyze the influence that social networking sites have had on "real" life. To do this, we constructed a four step process of interaction that transposed the rules of Facebook as close as possible onto real life. Our hypothesis was that behaving as if one were on Facebook in live settings would be seen as "socially awkward," "surreal," or "bizarre" to onlookers, particularly because such actions break the frame of both live and digital interaction. We found that, although more and more are familiar with social networking sites, a mode of interaction based on them does not succeed in "real" life.