I couldn’t say “no” to the chance to evaluate one of my roommates’ Facebook profiles, and so the only really hard part of this assignment was choosing which one. She rates her profile a 5 in accuracy across the board except in one category: her address. According to her, the address is her old apartment building because she is “too much of a lazy bum” to change it. I would agree with her assessment that her Facebook profile is, for the most part, very accurate and representative of her personality. However, she is notorious among our mutual friends as someone who refuses to be tagged in photographs where she believes she looks anything less than perfect. So I would have to rate her as a 1 to a 1.5 in terms of accuracy in what her photos reflect of her true self. Because of her vigilant monitoring of what pictures of her get published, she is greatly altering the identity-based assessment signals of her Facebook persona. These pictures are assessment signals because most people believe what they can see for themselves over what they read or hear about, and hers give an impression that is more false than true. It is interesting to me that she chooses to exert such attention to an assessment signal, in order to create a skewed impression, but does not bother to alter anything about the conventional signals of her personal information of Facebook. While her pictures tell one story, her lists of what she finds interesting, her favorite music and movies, and even her favorite quotes represent a person that exactly matches the real deal.
This makes sense when we consider that assessment signals are much more strongly considered in terms of personality evaluation, so altering them takes much more vigilance and perseverance, but also has a higher value. Lastly, I think that this careful scrutiny of self-presentation seen in my roommate’s online photos is going to very quickly (and very soon) expand to encompass all aspects of Facebook for most, if not all of its users. This is due to the increased use of Facebook by prospective employers to research their applicants’ personal lives outside of the résumé. I won’t get into the ethics of this for this blog, but it would be fun to examine at a later date. Facebook was named after the college tradition of a paper reference book with students’ names and pictures, intended to help people get to know one another. The variety of ways in which to express oneself in the online version of this concept takes the experience to a new place, where one is not just saying “Hi, here I am," but rather, "Hi, here is how I want you to see me."
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4 comments:
Spencer,
It seems that most people are relatively truthful on facebook because it is a social networking site and it would be odd to display a different presentation of yourself if your friends, who already know you, are viewing them. Whereas, on a dating site, there are more strangers who are viewing your profile so people probably want to manage their presentation more carefully to make good impressions.
By filtering her pictures, your friend is not only deceiving people by the Feature-based Approach, but she is also applying the Hyperpersonal Model because she is using selective self-presentation. Maybe in doing so, people will over-attribute their impressions of her. I have a friend who also carefully filters her pictures and on one occasion, when she met a facebook friend face to face for the first time, he jokingly said, “you look better in your facebook pictures.” Ever since then, she has completely privated her pictures, even though he repeatedly said he was just joking. Now I’m not sure if I’d consider no shown photos as altering an identity assessment, but it is interesting to see how people react to other people’s perception of themselves and how cautious people are about our self-presentation.
Spencer,
I wouldn't consider your roommate's untagging of photos as being dishonest or misleading. I think it is just a form of selective self-presentation. While I agree that only allowing "good" pictures of herself to be shown might be a little obsessive and controlling, she is not deceiving anyone by doing so. If she decided to take all the pictures of herself off however, and post pictures of a completely different person, then she would be acting dishonestly. So while her pictures may not be a 5 in terms of accuracy, they are still her and she is just selectively self-presenting herself to the online world as she would like to be seen.
Hey Spencer, great post! I really liked the idea of looking into how employers are looking at Facebook profiles of potential employees. Personally, it kind of creeps me out.
On another note, I too found that Facebook profiles were generally honest, but I agree with Tyler. I don't think I would necessarily classify your roommate's filtering pictures as deception. It's not like she's showing pictures of some other girl than herself. They are just better pictures than others. This shows the importance and commonness of selective self-presentation on Facebook profiles.
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