For assignment number four, I chose to analyze the truthfulness of my friend's facebook page. To my surprise, I found it to be rather accurate in its portrayal of her assessment and conventional signals. The facts about her assessment signals were all correct. She listed herself as a Cornell student with her major, hometown, date of birth and year of graduation. Her Cornell webmail address was also listed, verifying that she is in fact affiliated with the university. Her current status is also truthful; she listed herself and single and interested in men. Many people on facebook, particularly girls, find humor in listing themselves as married to their best friends. This may be deceiving to some new facebook members, but it is common and mundane to the experienced ones. With that in mind, she remained true to her identity and originality by simply listing single.
In the area of conventional signals is where the truthful rating of 5 begin to slip down to 4 and 3. To begin with, her quotes are representative of her personality. They are from her favorite movies and from a song undoubtedly featured in her top 25 iTunes playlist. One quote is from the movie "Miracle", which reveals that she is an athlete and has a great appreciation for sports. The Favorite Music list, on the other hand, begins to stray from her true personality. She claims that The Who is one of her favorites, although I am positive she only can name one song for which they are famous. Of the 20 bands she has listed, only two or three stretches of the truth are not enough to falsify her self-presentation. Her Favorite Movies and Favorite TV shows are not elaborated upon either. She declared a completely accurate 5 in this section, and I confirmed this, knowing that her DC++ library of tv shows really does consist of Entourage, That 70's Show, and Grey's Anatomy.
Overall, these findings went against Depaulo'sSocial Distance Theory which states that lying and deceiving is done most in a more distant and lean media. I believe this is because of the small network in which facebook allows its members to create. Of course, members are allowed to(and often do) have as many "friends" as possible, but most people only allow people they know to view their page. This fact creates less of a motive to deceive, because most of the people with whom you are interacting in facebook you are also interacting with them face to face. Knowing that your close friends can view your page diminishes the motive to create a falsified image.
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Jenny,
Your post appealed to me since like you, I found that “lying on Facebook is overrated.” It doesn’t surprise me that you found the assessment and conventional signals on your friend’s Facebook page to provide a fairly accurate portrayal of herself.
I think it is interesting that your friend chose to include The Who under her favorite music when you believe she doesn’t even know more than one of their songs. I definitely think that this relates to selective self-presentation, since she may wish to portray that “chill” classic-rock side of her that may not reflect her “self” but rather her “ideal self”. I agree with you that a few stretches of the truth are not enough to falsify her self-presentation, but at the same time I feel it is important to recognize that due to the asynchronicity of our profiles we have the ability to carefully choose what to include in our profiles to present ourselves in a certain light.
I think you made some good connections to disprove the Social Distance Theory in this case. Although Facebook may traditionally be thought of as a more distance and lean media, I think you made a great point by mentioning that users have the ability to create a small network (in which distance may be substantially smaller than one might suspect). I believe that individuals would not want to lie on their profiles since they know that their “real-life” friends would be able to notice if their profile wasn’t a true portrayal of themselves.
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