Direction: When I logged in to Facebook this week,i was greeted with updates from such friends as Mareah Carey, Natalie portman and
Ryan Gosling, right? Except that when i clicked through. It was clear that these posts were from my same, lame no-name
friends who were simply jumping on the latest Facebook bandwagon. Yes, it is (or was as these things don’t exactly have strict
expiration dates) Celebrity doppelganger week on Facebook , during which people replace their profile picture with the celeb
they think they look most like them.
This is the operative word here. I love my friends, but trust me-it’s a motley crew that little resembles anyone casting directors would want to put in a feature film. But more disturbing than the creative liberties they took in choosing their twins is that, this is just the latest example of how my friends-and hundreds of thousands of people around the world-are susceptible to face book groupthink. These are grass-roots names that spread virally throughout the site, making them difficult to trace back to an origin with any certainty. The Huffington post published what appeared to be the transcript of an interview with Bob Patel, and IT worker who says his resemblance to Tom selleck prompted the start of Doppelganger Week. But the claim (and the transcript itself) is dubious-the article is even tagged as “satire,” but that hasn’t stopped blogs and news organizations from citing Patel as the instigator.