Your Profile is like your own little website shrine to yourself. You have a profile picture, some details about yourself, and your Wall. Nowadays, it seems as if the site has a modicum of real life real time interaction; people can express their current status (i.e. getting ready to go out, or doing work), they can express their current mood, they can even instant message with another friend that is online.
In order to create a profile one needs to enter certain information about them. like your gender, where you are from, your birthday, relationship status, religious views, contact info (i.e. email, phone number, address), etc. There really is no limit to the amount of information one can put up about themselves. One can also choose not to put up certain information.
But a facebook profile is so much more than just textual information. People can manipulate the information they give about themselves in such a way to affect how they are seen by others. By selecting which photos to display of yourself, and what favorite quotes to list, you really manipulate your appearance to an unknowing eye.
All of the information found in a Profile falls into one of two categories, conventional or assessment signals. Conventional signals would be things like, your favorite quote or your mood or status, whereas Assessment signals would be your age, gender, etc. The conventional signals are fairly easy to manipulate, and one can change them in order to create a false impression of themselves for instance. Now lets look at one of these profiles close up.
When I asked my friend to rate the accuracy of the information on his profile from a 1 to 5, 1 being very inaccurate and 5 being very accurate he said he ranked it at 5. Being that I know this person very well, I decided to take a look and see if he was being truthful. It turns out he was.
When looking at my friends profile, the first thing i noticed is he doesn't have much extra information about himself. He has only one picture, his profile picture; he lists his age, and hometown, and birthday, email address, phone number, and status... that's it. He also has his Wall, and numerous music videos he has uploaded. From what I can see there is no deception at hand here. The basic information he has listed about himself is true, the music videos he has uploaded are definitely the type of music he loves, so he's not trying portray someone he's not. With no pictures of himself uploaded other than his profile pic, he stops people from developing any type of extraneous impression (i.e. they can't look at a picture of him partying and immediately label him a party animal).
All in all I was not surprised that there was deception in my friends profile, but it should be noted that not all profiles are like this. As a matter of fact I would argue it is rare to find a profile lacking a deception. Because on Facebook, if things are ugly, its very easy to put a new face on things.
3 comments:
I think that your friend's deception is that he limits the amount of information that he puts on Facebook about himself and doesn't allow people to get to know the person he really is. For whatever reason, he chooses to manage his impression through selective self presentation.Does he think that he is really not being deceiftful by choosing to limit the information he displays about himself intead of lying?
I wonder if anything more could be revealed about your friend’s personality by the comments posted on his wall, the list of his buddies, or the types of networks and groups that he joins? I had a similar Facebook viewing and found a correlation between the valence and the type of information posted. Out of curiosity was your friend’s Facebook profile meant for a specific purpose? For example, the Facebook account that I viewed was created with the intention of establishing career enhancing networks. I wonder if your friend’s honest but sparse blog was created in hope of impressing colleagues. Similarly, what type of personality does he have? If your friend is an outgoing person, wouldn’t his lack of pictures and the brief “about me” section be, in theory, an active deception? I’m posing so many questions because I’m interested in learning about the motivation for participating on Facebook and the level of deception in their profile. I think there is a real correlation between a Facebook participant’s selective self presentation and the type of audience that would have access to their Facebook blog. His Facebook profile presents a unique perspective. Thank you for sharing it.
As Yvette said, I think when a person doesn't put up a lot of information about themselves, they are not exactly being deceptive but giving off a different impression that most mainstream Facebook users provide. It sounds to me like your friend is a private person or perhaps someone who distrusts the internet. However, I could be easily saying this from experiences I have with my friends and their usage of social network sites. Either way, maybe his profile says more than you really think by not saying much at all.
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