I decided to analyze one of my close friend’s Facebook profile. A Facebook profile typically has information about the user on the top right corner. This information in other types of medium would be considered assessment signals. In Facebook, however, some of these things can be considered conventional signals since they can be easily changed or hidden. Below this there is a section called personal information where most of the information can be considered conventional signals. The information here includes things like activities, favorites, and a short description about the user. Users also have the ability to put in a very short description of what they are doing (status), people might get some impressions depending on what the user chooses to put there. A user’s friend count is another conventional signal that a Facebook profile contains.
I asked my friend to rate himself in the accuracy of the 4 parts of his Facebook profile which I just described. The information at the top right corner like his network, sex, hometown is present, except that my friend chose to omit his relationship status and his political views. My friend rated himself with a 5 in this section. I asked about omitting his relationship status, he told he wanted it to be personal and private. Even though his profile lacks relationship status, it does say he is only looking for friendship. When it comes to his political views, he told me he doesn’t want to associate with any political ideology because his views depend on the issue. In the personal information section my friend gave himself a 4.5. I asked him whether or not his friend count truly reflected the amount of people he knew. My friend has 795 Facebook friends, but he gave himself a 2.5 on this. He gave his status information a 5 for accuracy.
I think my friend has a very accurate representation of himself on Facebook. His personal information is very accurate, with perhaps a few minor inaccuracies. He is a very social person and this is reflected by the amount of friends he has and also by the number of clubs he belongs to. He has a girlfriend, but yet he didn’t include that in his profile which might get someone to think he wants to be sneaky about it. But, there are many other elements in his profile that might hint at it, like the information in “looking for”. I don’t think my friend did much selective self-presentation, since the things he chose to omit were not really for impression formation, but rather for personal reasons. He also has some things that are not necessarily going to allow for better impression formation like: “I dislike feminists” which might not be a popular view at Cornell.
I feel his profile wasn’t aligned with any particular theory. He didn’t really do selective self presentation, because his profile was honest and the few things he left out were for personal reasons. His “lies” were very subtle, but it really wasn’t to enhance the way other people viewed him. This seems to contradict what we saw in the online dating experiment. I think it is because the motivations are different, in an online dating environment the main purpose is attracting others. In Facebook, however, this might not be always true, my friend doesn’t want to attract anyone since he already has a girlfriend and I doubt he is the type of person who might want to appear cool to everyone. I think that if we consider different motivations for online profiles we might see different results, for example profiles for work environments, dating or others.
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2 comments:
I have a feeling that every female in the class is going to take exception to your belief that your friend was honest in the category of relationship. I would also be interested in how his girlfriend would evaluate his honesty. I think that omitting information is as active a manipulation of one’s self-presentation as information that is added. I think the same principle applies to his omitting his political views. What I found very interesting is that my female Facebook profile omitted the same two categories, but she admitted she was manipulating her self presentation. Maybe the male gender is not as willing to admit his goals of impression management. I believe that this is consistent with the results found in “Separating Fact From Fiction,”(Toma et al) in which men found lying about relationship status marginally more acceptable than women. Also interesting is the fact that both my female and your male subject lied about their relationship when experimental result showed that online daters felt that lying about relationship status is “less socially acceptable than lying about any other category.” I found reading your analysis very enlightening, because it made me aware how gender impacts how I interpret results. Thanks.
I strongly disagree with sam's comment. Omitting personal information cannot be considered lying or an act of deception. Sure omitting information has the potential to impact another person's impression development of someone, but it isn't quite on par with lying and deception. In class we defined Digital Deception as "the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of the message." Simply omitting information in a profile does not imply that a person is consciously making a decision to modify the way he/she appears to another. I feel that in a media such as facebook you must assume that a person simply didn't want to volunteer certain pieces of information. After all if you consider omitting information lying then everyone lies on facebook because NOBODY fills out every single aspect of a facebook profile to its fullest.
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