Assignment # 4- Option 2

After being launched on February 4^th, 2004, Facebook has made itself a major part of college communities across the world. This social networking device connects and informs its viewers about friends, colleagues, and co-workers on a personal, yet public level. I find it amazing how people will publicly display information and pictures about themselves to complete strangers. Although your ‘friends’ on Facebook will know much of the information displayed on your profile page, complete strangers are still able to see, search, or in essence, stalk you via the Internet. This is an unsettling fact to many people.

A Facebook profile is composed of several major parts. The one that is probably viewed and changed most often is the profile picture. This section allows for the user to display himself/herself in whatever fashion that he or she wants. As long as you can import an image from the internet or your computer, you can have that as your profile picture. I have seen people use celebrities or athletes as their profile picture, and this is one way of publically displaying oneself. The profile picture creates a sense of possible anonymity and deception as people are able to display themselves in any fashion they want. Conventional signals found on Facebook are ones that are ‘low cost’ and display small, selective aspects of a person- such as interests, hobbies, or favorites. These items are typically lied about, compared to assessment signals which are not frequently lied about. Assessment signals include one’s status, birthday, and more personal information that would be ignorant to lie about.

After interviewing a friend of mine about his Facebook profile, I came to the conclusion that he was truthful with a lot of what he displayed online. His profile picture accurately displayed his current self, and information describing ‘networks, sex, interested in, birthday, and hometown’ is all truthful (high cost, assessment signals). The only information that differed from not being totally accurate (5=most accurate), was information regarding residence and groups that he felt a true belonging to (more-so low cost signals). He explained that the groups he was a part of, were old and he did not actively take part in them. Thusly, he assigned a 3 for categorizing “groups.” There was a low frequency of false information displayed on his Facebook profile, and a high magnitude of truthfulness.

After analyzing the Facebook profile I viewed, I realized that this profile as well as many others, can relate to the SIDE (Social Identity/Deindividuation Theory). This theory holds that in text based environments such as the Internet, there are limited nonverbal cues which create individuals to become deindividuated. Facebook is a social medium that allows for limited contact between individuals, and this limited contact creates disassociation between different people. This theory also sheds light on self-presentation and how one displays themselves in an online setting (by taking social cues and then exaggerating them). Certain aspects of the Hyperpersonal Model (Walther, 1996) also relates to Facebook, especially the aspect of selective self-presentation and behavioral confirmation. Through Facebook, people are able to select certain aspects of their personality to display to the public. This selective presentation creates a false reality for many viewers, as well as the actual person. Additionally, if they display themselves a certain way online, they will become like the person they portray through their online social medium. I have found this behavioral confirmation to be very prevalent and it is very interesting to analyze how individuals represent themselves online compared to face-to-face.

http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/09/blog-4-facebook-fraud.html

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