For this assignment I decided to analyze the deception level of the Facebook profile of a friend from home. First, it is necessary to determine the various elements of a Facebook profile: physical appearance; relationship status; world views, including political and religious; activities and interests; favorites; and finally, contact and network information. Conventional signals, which are low cost displays that are only conventionally associated with a characteristic, are quite common and in fact dominate the anatomy of a Facebook profile, including relationship status, world views, activities and interests, and favorites. In contrast, there is much fewer assessment signals, which are costly displays directly related to an organism’s characteristics. Although physical appearance can be a conventional signal, the only way to determine physical appearance on Facebook is through actual posted photos (instead of a weight and height listing), so the display’s cost is increased. Also, since the only way to join a school network on Facebook is to have a working school email address, and it would be costly for someone to try to contact you with the wrong phone number or AIM screen name, contact and network information can be classified as an assessment signal.
My friend completed a self-report of profile accuracy, rating these Facebook profile elements on a scale of 1 (completely inaccurate) to 5 (completely accurate). She rated physical appearance, relationship status, and contact and network information as 5, and her world views, activities and interests, and favorites as 4.
When I performed the cross-validation of her Facebook profile, I found that her profile was generally accurate. Her photos represented her physical appearance accurately, though I’m sure that a few, less desirable ones were untagged every now and then. Her relationship status, single, was also accurate. Her world views, though constantly changing, were currently as follows: political, liberal; religious, Justin Timberlake. Believe it or not, my friend does not worship Justin Timberlake; she is Catholic. In this case, the lie was so egregious that it was not meant to be taken seriously. A deception, yes, but an intentionally humorous one at that. Her interests, as well as her favorites, were accurate overall, but she had a particularly interesting activity listed – saving the world. Unless my friend has a part-time job where she has to quickly change in a broom closet, I think again she is being somewhat facetious in her Facebook profile. Finally, her contact and network information were entirely accurate.
I believe that my friend’s Facebook profile supports the selective self-presentation theory. The construction of any Facebook profile involves selective self-presentation – there is no way a person can list everything about themselves. Inevitably, my friend, like most others, chose her favorite, most desirable qualities. The main goals involved with selective self-presentation are to appear honest and attractive. In the case we looked at in class, this was achieved through frequent but subtle lies. My friend’s profile is the exact opposite though – by lying infrequently and so grossly, she appeared attractive by showing a sense of humor, and honest by the contrast of these obvious lies with the rest of her profile.
Comment 1 and Comment 2
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Facebook profiles, I agree are good supporters of the selective self-presentation theory. Though most of the time, like you pointed out, the important information about a person is accurate, of course people are bound to tweak here and there information that can afford to be "white lies." I think most people's results showed that Facebook profiles on the most part were accurate presentations of themselves. In my opinion, I believe it is because as one of the goals of self-presentation, one wants to appear honest, so no one wants to have blatantly false information.
This also brings me to my next point about putting blatantly false information on our Facebook profiles. As you stated, your friend put her religious view as Justin Timberlake. I guess the question arises, even though this can be seen as digital deception, because it definitely was intentional, is it really? Because your friend knows that we all know she must not really worship him, is that why she put it there in the first place? The question arises, is it deception if we know that she knows that we know it's a lie? As Professor Hancock brought up this same type of issue with the court case about a defendant claiming that he knew the person he was talking to was in face not a young girl, but someone else deceiving him and pretending to be a young girl? I guess these are just some questions to consider when we put deceptive information up on Facebook, even though it's blatantly obvious that it's fake.
I came to almost the exact same conclusions when examining my friend's Facebook profile. She didn't lie frequently or subtly. Rather, she only lied about three times and they were all blatently obvious. I would not consisder this deception because she is not trying to deceive anyone, but I do agree with you that it is part of selective self-presentation. I hadn't thought that this is part of presenting yourself as humorous.
I find it quite interesting that so many facebook profiles tend to be on the more honest side. It would appear that people try to keep deception low on their profiles since there will inevitably be people viewing them that know whether or not they are telling the truth. However, I completely agree with the evaluation that selective self-presentation is being used. Users of facebook are out to make themselves look good. Although the social distance theory would say that they would try to accomplish this through deception because facebook is such a lean medium of communication, this does not always seem to be the case. I think that due to the personal pictures and the sections of information allowed, plus the fact that there will be a large group of people viewing a profile who might actually meet the person behind the profile in a face-to-face situation, it is a much more common choice to either consciously or unconsciously represent oneself in a more positive way through selective self-presentation of information and pictures that one will share on one’s profile.
Post a Comment