Sometimes , it is obviously they are just using a moniker. Nobody believes Linda McCartney or Ian Curtis have actually opened a Facebook account, and sometimes it is very cloudy indeed, the Mick Fleetwood account caused and causes much confusion. I think the litmus test should probably the Suzzy Roche one, where she has friends and family, personal pictures… you know, a real facebook as opposed to either Mick or, for that matter, ythe reason we are here, the Taylor Swift.
Sure I requested TSFB (Taylor Swift Facebook) to accept my friendship and indeed she did. What I found was around 4000 people and some of them were quite rude in their disbelief it was the real TS as opposed to a semi-fictional TSFB. Whoever it was had access to her Twitter account, extremely rare pictures, a good sense of her itinerary and a tone in her status updates and postings that seemed to be a reflection of who we might assume TS is.
But I didn’t particular believe it was Taylor. For one thing, I felt the Corey Monteith posting was out of character, and the claim that she had cancelled her concert that night bizarre in the extreme since she wasn’t performing that night.
But I wasn’t really bothered one way or the other. The majority of the friends on her page had agreed to agree that this was Taylor and that form of consensual reality trumps the question as to who was really behind the page and it really didn’t need TSFB’s explanation that it was an attempt to get closer to the fans, though it added a inner circle to the enterprise. Here is the post: “I’ve seen on a few of my statuses people are commenting things saying this is a fake profile. I’d just like to say, this is a my real profile. I made this profile to connect with the fans on a more personal level because they’ve done so much for me and this is just another way for me to thank them for everything. I knew that when I made this profile, people would call me fake and other things like that. And yes, I do know that by posting this status those comments/messages won’t stop completely, but I just thought I would say something about this situation. If you don’t believe it’s me, then unfriend me. Or, don’t even add me to begin with. I really would rather talking to people who friend me to talk to me and look at the pictures and updates I post! Thank you ”
Now, I am as cynical as the next guy but really, do we care what is real when here, in this small community of
The thing about identity is that it takes a universe to agree upon who you are and even if you really exist at all. I am not discussing, inner life, outer life, but really who you actually are. I might claim to be Taylor Swift and if everybody agrees I am than I am in fact Taylor. This is a concept that goes to the very heart of religion: if we all agree, or at least most of us agree, that God is indeed God then God is indeed God. And if we all agree that I am indeed Taylor then I am indeed Taylor.
For the Mick Fleetwood Facebook which had been going for years, the seams seemed to be showing and some of his friends, who had become close to MFFB over the years were quite distraught. It was a little sad and a little silly. I can see the moral problems with pretending to be someone you aren’t, it is an ambiguous problematic question. If the Mick friend who shared deaths and sorrows and really lifes was not in fact sharing them with who he thought he was sharing them with, how much does it matter who it was that helped him? How big betrayal.
Taylor Swift facebook stopped it quickly, a day after she asked all the people who were sending private messages to please have some patience with her while she tries to reply to them all she gave up on the experiment (if that is what it was) at reaching out to her audience a different way and then she changed her mind and came back on line then dropped it again. I just checked out mutual friends and I doubt Louise Goffin, who undoubtedly knows her through James Taylor, is friending a fake
Whoever was doing it a real or fake Taylor, learnt a quick lesson in reaching out: don’t bother, you will get overwhelmed in the mire of fame. But I am kinda sorry if it isn’t being a great experiment As far as I can tell, or think, or choose to believe, Taylor found a way to reach out to her fans, well 4200 of them as I write, and I am there to watch it. Meanwhile, I just friended Justin Beiber!