Project Sara Butler is designed to delvelop a better sense of why individuals choose to obtain friendship through social media (specifically Facebook) in order to better conceptualize identity and selfhood. The goal of this project was to create a fake Facebook account and to add as many people from the University of Oregon community...Out of the ~250 friend requests 'Sara' sent, 122 were accepted, and 6 individuals sent Sara a friend request despite the fact that they had never actually met her. In doing this, we were hoping to obtain Facebook friendships and interact with these individuals by posting status', photos, and "geotagging" Sara at certain hotspots throughout our community. In an attempt to understand why Sara's friends both accepted her as a friend, and added her themselves, we created a survey that asked her friends to answer the simple question of why they decided to accept her friend request/add her as a friend. We presented our findings through a powerpoint which summerized our research as to why individuals are compelled to seek friendship via Facebook.
This project focusses on why a person is compelled to attempt to obtain friendship over social media.
