The Friends of Heidi Brooke

  While Zack Miller was reading the Occidental Weekly (Occidental College’s newspaper) he came across an article about two students, Zack Bruno and Marielle Galanto, who decided to do a social experiment.  They created a fictional profile on Facebook with the name “Laurie Clark,” and said that she was a first year freshman who just transferred from Canada.  By the end of the first semester, Laurie had over 450 friends who all accepted her online even though they did not know who she was.

  What Bruno and Galanto got out of their little project was that on Facebook, there is no privacy whether people like it or not.  The majority of high school students don’t even look at the name of the person who send them friend requests; instead they just click “confirm” so that they have as many friends as possible.

  When Zack (Miller) got back to school on that following Monday, he told Rob Stephens (junior), Jake Merena (junior), and Tyler Hendricks (senior) about the article that he had read.  All four of the men decided that it would be interesting to see if the same type of thing could be pulled off at New Hope, even though there are only 450 students in the high school.

  Immediately they got to work, by creating their own avatar, if you would.  Designing everything from her hometown to her favorite quotes, the boys felt as if they had created the perfect storm.  The only thing left to do was name her.  Mrs. Brison happened to be in the library at the time that all of this was going down, so the boys decided to ask her opinion on what the perfect name would be.  She suggested Heidi as a first name, and the boys fell in love.

  The way the process would work would be that Zack would go home and create her on Facebook, as well as friend requesting as many students as possible. Within the first hour, “Heidi” had 45 friends that she requested, along with 8 more friends that happened to send her a request.  By the end of the first night, Zack had gotten Heidi over 100 friends from the high school. Day two was the day of interaction, which was handled by Rob Stephens.  Rob went home, signed in as Heidi, and talked away.  The job that Rob did was magnificent. He got Heidi to be the talk of the school the following day, and he even got a few people mad at Heidi, because he had started a little “cat-fight” on Facebook.  Even though there were people that were upset with her, there were also a handful of people who were in love with her.  Boys were handing out their numbers, offering Heidi tours of the school when she arrived, and also inviting her to parties.

  After day two, people from the school began to find out through word-of-mouth that Heidi was a fake and that it was all a joke being played on them by Zack and Rob, as well as Jake and Tyler.  What the students did not realize, however, was that the “joke” was actually a research project for their journalism class, which was a great success.

  In the end, the boys realized that people do not think twice about adding “friends” on Facebook, and they agreed that it is a problem that everyone should try to fix.  Instead of getting the greatest number of friends, what if everyone just tried to keep in touch with their camp, school, and work friends?  Would our world be a safer place if we limited our friends on Facebook? The answer is a resounding yes.

  In case anyone is wondering at this point- no, Heidi will not be coming to school...but maybe next month she’ll reconsider. You will just have to check her wall at http://www.Facebook.com. Don’t worry, Heidi continues to update her page on a somewhat regular basis; there is still hope guys.