I chose to assess the facebook profile of a close friend, one who is considered a veteran in the Facebook world. She joined back in 2003, when Facebook was an exclusive club for those who attended Ivy League Schools. Her profile is very thorough, but as I am a close friend I am aware of some fabrications. The internet is a place where digital deception occurs on a daily basis; people intentionally control what they share online and therefore have the ability to create a false belief to receivers. Facebook profiles are right in line with the identity-based theory, where people will falsely display their identities and manipulate their attributes. People who don’t know this girl, let’s call her Jodi, would believe that her most important interests are bloody marys, Sunday brunch, and crossword puzzles (those are the first three interests she lists). Mostly, people will use conventional signals to enhance their Facebook profiles because all one has to do is think up some cool interests and then type them in. It is easy to hide embarrassing or “uncool” characteristics online.
From observing Jodi on a personal level, I know her favorite interests include food shopping with her mom, eating ice cream, and watching TV. There will never be a girl who will post publicly that she enjoys ice cream-it’s taboo. I called Jodi after looking at her profile and asked her if she had done any of her “real” interests in the last week. I asked her to use a rating of 1 (not done) to 5 (done daily). She gave shopping with her mom a 3, eating ice cream a 1, and watching TV a 5. I then asked her if she had sipped on a bloody mary, ate Sunday brunch, or done a crossword puzzle in the past week, and she gave me 1’s for all. Assessment signals, as part of identity-based digital deception, play a big role in how someone portrays themselves on the internet. I conclude that Jodi had a high frequency of lying online to make herself look cool and hip. However, the magnitude of her deceptive ways is not large, whether or not someone does the crossword puzzle everyday does not define them. It is very interesting to see how much time and effort people put into making the perfect Facebook profile. The people viewing it either already are your friends, or simply don’t care.
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3 comments:
Hi you!
I think that the way you rated Jodi’s interests was a very interesting take on Catalina’s study, but I don’t think it accurately rates deception. In my Facebook profile, for example, I have the beach listed as one of my interests. If I were rating this interest based on Catalina’s method, I would have, on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being completely inaccurate and 5 being completely accurate), rated this interest a 5. If, however, I were rating this interest based on your method, I would have, on a scale from 1-5, rated this interest a 1. Although the beach is one of my favorite things and I am highly interested in spending as much time as I can there, I have not been there in the past week. This, however, is because of the fact that I am not in an environment currently that allows me to do such, and not because I am not interested in it.
I think you made a very good observation, however, in regards to how Jodi used selective self-presentation by leaving things off of her profile. People often forget that impression management also has to do with the things that we deliberately do not tell people, and not just the positive and impression forming things that we do communicate to others.
Overall, great job! I look forward to reading more!
Dana,
Nice job with your post. I feel as though you could have gone into depth a bit more with describing assessment signals and conventional signals. There are such signals which make Facebook and Facebook profiles unique and stand apart from other mediums- describing them would only enhance the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the topic. Second, relating the information to current and applicable theories is a major part of the posts which could have been brought out a bit clearer. Deception, although a major part of this course, was possibly secondary to other theories such as selective self-presentation and behavioral confirmation found in the Hyperpersonal Model. Again, these are just suggestions, but I enjoyed reading your post. It was concise, direct, and provided good background for novice readers. Nice job and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work.
I think it's interesting the way you asked your friend to evaluate the authenticity of her interests; instead of just "least accurate" to "most accurate" you used a different method - like the first commenter, however, I will agree that this may have skewed your results somewhat (for instance, a person only HAS one chance a week to eat Sunday brunch, which certainly makes it less likely that a person will have done that in the past week than a crossword puzzle or getting drunk - a variable you might have considered).
I also like the way in which you qualify the magnitude of your friend's lies - it's true that the ones you detected were not at all egregious, despite being relatively frequent.
Although my experiment yielded different results, I reached more or less the same conclusion: it IS interesting to see how much time people spend on their Facebook profiles, how much thought goes into crafting this particular online persona. If anything, my friend spent even MORE time crafting his profile, even without lying - it really is a fascinating phenomenon.
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