Assignment 4: Lack of Anonymity

For Assignment #4, I chose to investigate the second option, analyzing deception in Facebook. Facebook is an online social networking site in which users can share their lives and connect with others. A users profile page contains a number of features including a default picture, additional tagged pictures and photo albums, basic details, contact information, a list of friends and a wall with friends’ comments just to name a few. One of the most significant features of Facebook is its lack of anonymity. This lack of anonymity sets Facebook apart from almost every other online social networking site. For example, the majority of Facebook users that use Facebook to connect with their “real-life” friends register under their full first and last names—Facebook doesn’t have a nickname option like Myspace or Xanga. Additionally, any small change you make to your Facebook profile is broadcasted to your entire list of friends through Facebook’s distinctive “News-feed” feature. This leaves little room for deception when those you have added as friends are also your “real-life” friends.

Unlike other online sites, Facebook is jam-packed with assessment signals. Many people voluntarily share their full names, phone number, home address and email address. Although these features can be easily edited, omitted and/or forged, in any typical “university network” (such as Cornell University), they reflect upon a users’ “real-world” identity. Facebook’s conventional signals, on the other hand, are much more transient. These signals include the text one may write on a friend’s wall, one's interests, favorite quotes, or relationship status. These “low-cost” features do not necessarily define one’s “off-line” identity and can be easily edited at the click of a mouse without needing much explanation.

After administering Catalina’s method of rating to my friend, I discovered that she didn’t lie at all on her Facebook. Her contact information (assessment signals) mirrored her actual residence, email address and IM name. Her personal information (conventional signals) reflected her interests, activities and favorite quotes quite accurately. Additionally, the groups she belonged to reflected things she felt passionately about and her pictures accurately helped to display what her day-to-day life was like.

Although my friend didn’t place anything in her Facebook profile to intentionally deceive, like any other online profile, she did have similar goals of “appearing attractive and appearing honest” in mind. By using selective self-presentation, she didn’t include any information in her profile about herself that may make her seem ignorant or uninviting, nor did she tag any pictures of herself that may have made her look physically unattractive. Although she wasn’t exactly lying about herself in her Facebook profile, she was deceiving others by intentionally omitting parts of herself from her profile.

The communications that take place through my friend’s profile are always asynchronous, allowing her time to construct the manner in which she puts her message across. Since everything she writes on someone’s wall or sends in a message leaves a trace, I would consider her Facebook to be a recordable media. Therefore, according to Hancock et al.’s feature-based model, my friend would not be expected to deceive over a media such as Facebook because it is asynchronous and recordable (for the most part). However, since the people that my friend communicates with over Facebook are physically distributed for the most part, she has a small opportunity to deceive and selectively self-present herself.

http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/part-i-this-weekend-i-resolved-to.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-option-2.html