For this assignment, I decided to dive in to the anatomy of a facebook profile. Each profile can be divided into about 8 separate customizable parts: the basic info, the contact info, the education info, the work info, the picture, the layout and the applications. Each of these is voluntarily given and shared with the other members of the site. When one considers which signals might be assessment and conventional, there are, of course, more conventional than assessment signals on such an asynchronous space. Almost everything included on a facebook profile can be manipulated or hidden in some way but if one considers the information that one actually chooses to share than there are a couple of assessment signals. The person’s school email address is usually a good indicator of where that person goes to school. If someone helped build a website or contributed to one and they leave the URL on the page than that can be an indicator of some projects that they may be working on. Facebook lets other users know if you are online at the same time as they and that is a good indicator of the kinds of hours during which people operate. Pretty much everything else on a facebook profile is a conventional signal.
Now when I interviewed my friend about her facebook profile, I pulled out my laptop, brought up her profile and asked her to rate the accuracy of each of the 8 parts into which I had previously divided the profile. As we went from section to section, I was barraged with little questions about technicalities and exception to the accuracy system. She wanted to know how I would be rating her accuracy but I told her that I would not tell her so she could not shape her answers to go with theory that she thought I was trying to prove. By the end of our assessment, she had rated all parts of her profile with either a 5 or 4 and many of her 4s were only given as fours because she did not want to give all 5s.
When I evaluated my friend’s profile and her responses to my questions, I found that it supported a theory that I agreed with (for the most part) when I heard it in class, the media richness theory. For the most part, my friend was very truthful about all the information that she put on her profile. She did not put much personal information but the stuff that she did put up is accurate as far as I know as her friend. Some could say that the great amount of information that she chose not to include was an act of digital deception but I do not think this is the case. When Hancock was defining digital deception, he mentioned how it entail purposely excluding information in the hopes of giving someone a false idea about who you are and what you stand for, etc. I know that my friend’s lack of information on her profile was probably a result of practical reasoning (like avoiding harassment or stalkers) and her own laziness to spill out her whole life in text fields. I really don’t believe that she cares enough about the opinions of the facebook community to painstakingly scrutinize every aspect of her profile before putting it up. I was surprised to see how much more truthful she is on a CMC medium than she is in her daily correspondence(I have seen say some pretty outrageous lies to people's faces).
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-option-2-edit-profilesave-changes.html
2 comments:
Mike,
I agree with your assessment that choosing to leave out some information on a Facebook account fits well in the media richness theory. Your friend was simply attempting to control what of her personal information was out there in the great void of the internet. She was clearly not trying to be deceitful. I think this line is crossed when an individual goes from casually omitting information to purposefully seeking out and controlling what information gets put out on Facebook (i.e. picture tagging). Furthermore, there is a very clear difference between digital deception (going out of one’s way to lie and/or sculpt a skewed impression) and simply trying to control how much personal information is available to the public (such as choosing whether or not to post a phone number for contact). A great post with some excellent points.
Mike, I think you do a good job of explaining the different aspects of facebook. You also make a very interesting point that you do not believe your friend was being deceptive by not listing all the information about herself online. I definitely agree and understand what you mean, she is not self selecting to present a "better" image of herself but simply because she did not want to post about her entire life.
I could see how your experience aligns with the Media Richness Theory, however I think it also aligns with the Features Based Approach. I also looked at my friend facebook account and due to the a asynchronous space and high recordability, I thought this theory properly aligned. Just another theory to consider. Great job on you post!
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