Having myself gone through a phase where I checked Facebook far more often than necessary, I decided that this would be the optimal option to opt for in order to complete Assignment #4.
For anyone unfamiliar with Facebook, it is at its core a networking tool, enabling people to keep in touch with friends at other schools. As time went on, however, more features were added (most notably the ability to share personal information and photos), which makes Facebook a very complex online space.
A Facebook profile contains many conventional signals: signals easy to change or manipulate. Anyone can lie about his favorite books or movies, and most people reading a profile fraught with those sorts of lies would be none the wiser - the truth bias does, after all, mandate that people are predisposed to believe other people, and who would have any reason to suspect that someone was claiming to like a film he didn't?
It could be argued that other aspects of the Facebook profile are assessment signals: things like gender, e-mail address, and name. These are harder to lie about - such lies are more easily falsifiable, especially when the people frequenting one's Facebook page actually know that person. In such cases, yes, name, age and gender are assessment signals - though it is not, of course, entirely implausible that someone could have created a profile with the sole intent of deceiving others online, and in this case pretty much all of Facebook is composed of conventional signals. It can thus be said that, according to the social distance theory, Facebook is a great medium for deception: it has many conventional signals that can be easily altered, making identity based deception frighteningly easy; but it is also still a socially lean medium, and lying in a Facebook wall post or private message is essentially the same as lying through e-mail (which the social distance theory predicted [albeit completely incorrectly] would be the most conducive to deception).
I know the friend I interviewed about his profile exceedingly well, which put me in an excellent position to verify the veracity of his claims. The first wave of elements he rated all 5: his network, e-mail address, gender, hometown and birthday I immediately realized were accurate. His political views he rated a 4; he told me that while the information in his profile had indeed been accurate at the time he had posted it, he hadn't bothered to go back and update his new political leanings because "form mirrors content" and his new viewpoint (political apathy) would be best expressed through commensurate apathy apropos his Facebook profile.
Everything else was rated 5; he told me he updates his personal info (movies, books, activities, interests, TV shows) fairly regularly so they were all completely accurate. I can attest to the truthfulness of some, but as he has many books and movies listed, I can't personally verify that he indeed likes all of them. He also told me he has never untagged himself in any picture because "that would be stupid," so he rated those a 5 as well.
Of course there may be some selective self-presentation going on, even if it's unconscious: this aspect of the hyperpersonal model is pretty much unavoidable with regard to profiling sites like Facebook. People aren't going to make information public that they don't want made public; they want to maintain a certain online image and anything that doesn't contribute to - or detracts from - that image has no place on their profiles, true or not.
In this particular case, there was very little deception, which is not in keeping with the social distance theory. Although Facebook is more or less an ideal medium for deception, that still doesn't necessarily mean everyone who uses it will be deceptive. Every theory has exceptions, after all.
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