For our last task for contempory media issues, we had to create a fake character using facebook. Unfortunately the week that the teachers had given us this task I was sick so was not in class. However, instead of joining into a group the next week, James McKeown and I decided to create our own group to make a character. We discussed different ideas for different types of personalities and how we would be able to convince other people on facebook that our character is a real person.
James and I decided to create a character that is really religious. Although this character is religious, we wanted him to be very critical of what other people around him are doing. An example would be teenagers writing on their facebook profiles about going out and getting drunk, John would not approve of this.
James and I added our own friends using John Flavels account. We were suprised as to how many of our friends accepted a man that they did not know just because they seen they had mutual friends with this person. However, we did have some people report abuse against John Flavel and also had one of my friends having an argument with "John" although it was actually me writing to her.
I thought it would be a good idea to have Johns hometown as a place in Ireland called Knock. Knock is known for being quite a religious place and people may thing that this is why he has become so religious if they seen that.
We also added a Twitter account to make it seem as though John was a real character with more than one social networking sight. On this, we talked about religion and followed religious groups on Twitter. I found that it was harder to have people follow you on twitter because when you add them as a friend on facebook, they can either accept or decline but when you follow someone on twitter, that doesn't always mean they will follow you back.
Below are links to both John Flavels facebook account and his twitter account.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100003619638228&sk=wall
https://twitter.com/
