Starting on Apirl 1st of this year, Dave Kim made it his mission to be your Best Friend Facebook Forever. The month-long social experiment had Dave attending every event he could (in 30 days he attended 84), making people’s birthday wishes come true, and friending over 700 people. And as far as social experiments go, it was pretty regimented. Dave lived by a set of 14 rules during the project, which included friending at least 30 people per day, messaging every new friend, and meeting people at every event.

In fact, his friending and message sending was so frequent, Facebook tried to shut him down. “Facebook itself was “creeped out” by Dave’s actions, as his pre-scripted messages to new friends set off alarms at FB HQ, which in turn repeatedly froze the message-sending capabilities of his account; near the end of April, FB shut down his ability to add new friends, cutting his friend count 34 short of an even thousand,” reads the concluding essay on the project’s website.

Project curator James Weissinger kept tabs on Dave, as well as statistics and journals of Dave’s experiences, and offers this final word on the project:

How much has Dave’s performance collapsed into his “real” persona; can we really separate the Dave of My BFFF from some phantom “normal Dave”? While we cannot immediately answer these questions, we can chart a few immediate outcomes. First, the project WILL continue for another year—in a way. Artist Lauren Marsella asked that Dave be her penpal for an entire year as a birthday present, and we feel that this commitment–made within the framework of the project—should be honored. A birthday request for a piece of Dave’s art from Larkin Dugan resulted in the creation the semi-conceptual $37 MAM (Make Art Motherfucker) Grant, still to be awarded to Dugan. Meanwhile, other less contractual relationships also look as if they may persist. It will be some time before we can chart the longterm effects of My BFFF Dave’s life. For now, however, Dave’s interactions throughout My BFFF provide us all with a “status update” regarding the myriad relationships we share with our own Facebook identities, and the anxiety we might still feel as our digital lives become—strangely, creatively—ever more entangled with and prioritized over our supposedly “real” ones.

Well done, Dave.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 11:22 am.