A cascade anecdote: Today I logged into Facebook and noticed that it had a birthday notification of one of my good friend's. Now, I am well aware that her birthday is in October, so I clicked on her page. There were tons of "happy birthday" messages from lots of people, including a couple of her close friends who have known her well since elementary school and actually know when her birthday is. I called my friend to see what was up, and, incidentally, I also woke her up.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that a couple of her friends changed her birthday on Facebook late last night. They then immediately wrote a few birthday messages from their own accounts to make it seem even more legitimate. Essentially, they started a cascade, which was so effective that it fooled people who normally could tell you immediately when her birthday is. One friend wrote "lies" on her page, but that one comment didn't stop many other people from continuing the trend, since at that point there had been so many messages to the contrary. This scenario (for at least two of the people who have known her for a long time) also illustrates the Ascher (not sure how that's spelled, but they guy who did the test with different lengths of lines) experiment.

I also think that this event illustrates to what degree people are transferring information/ relying on technology to give accurate information about other people. I know that I don't think twice usually about posting a birthday message or looking up contact info though the people that I have known for a while, I tend to remember that type of information. That being said, I remember knowing many of my classmates home phone numbers and birthdays by heart when I was in elementary and middle school because there wasn't another convenient way to remember them (I always misplaced my address book). It's an interesting side effect of technology that means that we don't have to logically think about things we already know about the world.