Deceit and Deception are two words all too commonly used when describing internet profiles and personalities. Digital deception is the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message, intended to create a false impression to the receiver of the message. I decided to take a look at my closest friend’s Facebook profile and see if there was any deception included in it. For those of you who aren’t as familiar with Facebook as others, the social networking site allows users to post “personal info” which includes interests, favorite music, etc. allowing other users to get to know who the person is. Following Catalina’s study, I printed out my friends profile and had her rate each element on a scale from 1 (completely inaccurate) to 5 (completely accurate). The results I found were quite interesting.
After analyzing my friends responses, there were nearly no lies found in her profile at all. In the Interest section, every single topic was rated a 5 for completely accurate. Every other section was also completely rated a 5 in accuracy except for Music and TV Shows. There were several topics in each of these two categories that were not rated a 5 for accurate. TV shows such as the OC, and That 70’s show, along with music such as rascal flats, were rated around the 2 to 3 area in accuracy.
Following the self-evaluation, I then tried to verify these answers, because had the person been lying in her profile, she very well could have lied to me about how accurate her information was. I contacted several of her friends via phone and instant message and after a bit of research found out that indeed most of these were indeed accurate and the few that she had lied about were actually not even deceitful, instead they had just been outdated.
The digital deception seen on Facebook would most closely align with identity-based deception. This is when there is manipulation or a display of a person’s identity. The type of information presented on sites such as Facebook, is usually pretty small displays of personality, which leads me to conclude that manipulation would be of conventional signals, which are low cost displays of identity. Since mostly conventional signals are displayed on Facebook, the user can easily manipulate their identity. These conclusions fit more closely with DePaulo’s Social Distance Theory which states that lying is uncomfortable for people to do in f2f, therefore we will chose to use the most “socially distant” media to lie, in this case Asynchronous chats such as Facebook.
Surprisingly, Social Distance Theory doesn’t hold up to my example. My subject had hardly any lying whatsoever. To try to explain this, I looked towards Media Richness Theory. The MRT states that people will choose lean media for less equivocal tasks. Perhaps people use Facebook (which is a lean media) for getting out less important information such as basic getting to know you facts such as favorite movies and TV shows. While I only studied one subject, it would be interesting to see if this is the case in most Facebook profiles.
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