Photo - 4
Housing and School Info - 5
Information (Holistically) - 4
Activities - 3
Music - 4
TV - 3
Movies - 3
Books - 4
Also worth mentioning is that he admits to frequently untagging photos of himself and deleting comments on his wall.
I concluded that the profile picture and the housing and school information sections of the profile are the most analogous to assessment signals, whereas the rest of the information is similar to conventional signals.
The profile picture is costly because it displays all of your visual characteristics, and once you posted a picture of yourself, you now have to be consistent with that image. If you change it to reflect a different gender or race, people will notice and your deception will be detected. Similarly, your school/residential information is relatively public and people can use another source to confirm that information. In this way, lying about either would be very noticeable.
Your other information is less costly. Changing your favorite books or movies is less likely to tip off a viewer. Deception in these areas is easier because the information doesn't have to be as consistent and you can change it whenever you want.
For the most part, I agreed with my friends accuracy scores. He knew and was willing to admit to me when his page embellished certain attributes and where it reflected him accurately. I did find it interesting that he felt overall he was providing information that scored 4, but when asked to break it down, his mean score was a 3.4. This indicates he thinks he is more accurate than he is.
All his confessions fell in line with Catalina's research. He agreed that he only listed the books, movies, and activities that sounded the coolest, or conveyed a more attractive self. None of his listed activities were fictional, he just used selective self-presentation to put forth his best foot, so to speak. This supports Catalina's idea that deception is frequent but subtle, as well as strategic. This allows my friend to appear attractive and honest simultaneously. Especially drawing on the fact that he posts more pictures of himself surfing (one of his listed activities) than he does collecting baseball cards (one of his not listed activities). In this way, he can further support his selected self-presentation, while appearing honest.
I have one qualm about all this, however. Catalina's research makes sense for a dating site. Facebook is all about social networking, but I don't know too many people who "meet" on facebook. For the most part, facebook friending occurs meeting in real life first. If we understand this to be true (which you can argue isn't) than why do people feel the need to deceive and present themselves in such a favorable manner?
3 comments:
I thought your post was interesting - especially how your friend thought that his information had an relative accuracy level of '4', but was actually a 3.4.
At the end, you post an interesting question. I'm not sure about your experiences with Facebook, but back when I first started using it I was friended by a lot of people I only knew peripherally. I knew them well enough to have to accept the friend request, but I didn't know them well enough to already be familiar with their interests. Perhaps others have found themselves in a similar situation, and the selective self presentation on Facebook is targeted at these peripheral individuals.
Furthermore, there is always 'that hot friend-of-a-friend' who could potentialy be looking at your profile. One would want to impress everyone looking at the profile, whether you knew the person or not.
Your last point is actually a really interesting one. Most of the people we know on Facebook are people that we become friends with in a face to face interaction and then develop a CMC interaction.
You're argument that "if my friends already know that I love to act stupid then why do i have to lie on facebook" is such a great question. I would probably say that most people tell little white lies on their profiles simply because so many more people than their best friends see their profile. After all, you still want to appear cool and exciting to everyone else.
It was also good to see that your friend mostly told the truth in their descriptions. I ran into the same type of results because it seems that most people are generally pretty honest about the information that they post on Facebook, but when it comes to pictures and wall posts, people are more inclined to "censor" their profile.
Good points!
I also liked the part of your post where you say that your friend thought he averaged a 4 for truthfulness, but it was actually a 3.4. This shows how easy it really is to lie on Facebook, and how little we even think about it. It's funny because we all take for granted that we lie on our own profiles, but how many of us are reading other people's profiles expecting that 40% of the stuff is completely made up? Probably not that many.
I wonder who all of these deceptions are actually intended for. It would be interesting if there were a way to separate different deceptions into different categories based on their intended recipients. For example, potential romantic partners, potential friends, potential employers, etc. Personally I've always been fascinated by the concept of intimate strangers and wonder if it plays out at all in terms of Facebook stalking and Facebook profile creation.
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