4: analysis of facebook account

Obviously facebook is somewhat of a revolutionary trend in the online world. Some of the more conventional signals displayed on facebook include the “personal info” section, where users can list their interests, and some of their favorite things. These descriptions are easily manipulated by the user and loosely associated with them, since there is no real way of knowing whether the information is accurate. They are low cost displays, only conventionally associated with characteristics. Other descriptions included on facebook are more assessment oriented. The network you belong to, your pictures, and the contact information, including age, birthday, relationship status—are all costly displays directly related to characteristics. That information is much easier to be detected as false.
The ability to falsify information so easily on this network, is a problem. To test the popularity of deception, I analyzed a friend’s profile. When asked to rate how accurate her information was from a scale of 1-5, she gave all of her multiple choice answers (networks, sex, interested in, relationship status, birthday, political views) a 5, for being completely accurate. Having known her for over a decade, I can attest to the validity of her answers. However when it came to the “personal info.” section, she even surprised herself by the inaccuracy of some of her answers. In her interests, out of the nine interests she listed, she only gave four of them a 5, for being completely accurate. She realized her other answers didn’t actually describe her at all, giving them a 3 or below. She would never offer the inaccurate answers as truth during a face to face interaction, but because of this socially distant media, deception production is simple and enticing. In the music section, she had 16 artists selected. She had a similar reaction to this section, realizing many of the artists were just people she thought she should listen to, maybe experiencing behavioral confirmation affects, from Walther’s hyperpersonal model of impression formation. The social distance theory explains her deception. Since lying is uncomfortable, a “socially distant” medium, such as facebook is perfect for lying. It is a lean medium with limited social and visual cues. In addition, her lies were small and harmless, therefore they appeared, and could very well have been perceived as honest by a user who had never met her. This fits into the view of how people have self-presentational goals when they participate in virtual networks. Appearing attractive is a goal, therefore, telling small subtle lies to achieve that goal is common. Knowing this friend very well, her assessment of the lies she told seems completely accurate; she was not lying about the lies she had told. Essentially, because the medium being used lacked social cues, deception production was increased.