Facebook profiles offer many layers of self-presentation and further convolute the game of deception. Although deception is defined as a strategic act that is part of an ongoing, interactive communication process by the Interpersonal Deception Theory, Facebook allows users to use deception as a medium for entertainment in addition to strategic deception.
To explore this new form of trivial deception, I turned to my friend Phil’s profile and asked him to rate the accuracy of his basic, personal, educational, and work information. All of the traits rated are conventional, as he provided the information. After reviewing his assessment, we both agreed that most of his information was completely accurate. I used his wall and photos as assessment signals, which his friends created for him. Phil’s friends present him as an outgoing, funny, and likable person. His assessment signals match his conventional signals by reinforcing his laid back interests in partying, sports, and playing the guitar.
Despite a strong congruence in Phil’s assessment and conventional signals, there were a few blatant lies in his conventional profile. Although Cornell is known for offering many majors, we both knew Beerpong Physics and Sexual Escapades were not his real majors. He also mentioned that he slept in the nude and worked at a money laundering pastry shop.
Although Phil lied through conventional signals, he did not intend to mislead anyone. His conventional signals help break the ice of mediated, online communication. He told me that its funny to see Beerpong Physics in a field that the rest of the world takes seriously; it reveals a strong sense of humor. He also told me he’s not ashamed of his major nor is trying to hide it; he just chose to represent himself this way for a good laugh. His behavior models a modified Social Distance Theory in that people are more prone to lie online over face to face. Phil lied to compensate for the mediated nature of Facebook profiles and add humor to his impersonal representation.
While Phil doesn’t believe he lied, he still misrepresented certain aspects of his profile to accomplish a goal. In traditional deception the goal is malignant, but in Phil’s case he utilized deception to achieve humor. Both forms of deception rely on conventional signals and illustrate how signal manipulation can affect representation in different contexts. Beerpong Physics and Sexual Escapades is not an isolated case. Many girls and a few boys list themselves as in relationships with other people of the same sex, despite the fact they are clearly heterosexual. These instances are analogous to Phil’s use of deception as a way to break the ice and utilize conventional signal misrepresentation in a novel, humorous way.
The variety in which people use deception make it difficult to classify a lie, which depends on its social context. This variability may help explain the inconsistencies between the Media Richness Theory and Social Distance Theory. Humorous deception follows the Social Distance Theory in that deception is utilized more in mediated environments to add humor. However, the Media Richness Theory focuses more on serious lies that are intended to deceive rather than placate, and should take place in a face to face medium. A stricter definition of deception may help bridge the gap in the theories, as deception occurs in many forms for unpredictable purposes.
Comment 1
Comment 2
Monday, September 17, 2007
4: Facebook Frenzy
I chose to write about option 2 this week since Facebook is the most popular social networking site for college students. Off the top of my head I can only think of one friend at Cornell who doesn’t have Facebook. (I know. How does she live?) Anyways, because so many people have Facebook I knew that I was bound to find someone that would be willing to rate their own profile.
I had my friend rate each of her elements one through five. I then also ranked them, based on what I know about her from our friendship thus far. According to her, she was very honest. She ranked her basic info, contact info, activities, interests, and TV shows as fives, and her music and movies as fours. The things that she felt she had manipulated were conventional signals. This is not uncommon as people are selectively self-presenting everytime they edit their Facebook profile. (And we all know when you’re editing your profile because Newsfeed so graciously tells us).
For the most part I agreed with the numbers my friend ranked. The main discrepancy I saw was that in her activities she has five things listed, three of which she did in high school and does not participate in at Cornell.
There were two other things I noticed about her profile, that I didn’t address when I orginially asked her to rate her profile. The first is the number of friends she has. As I write this she has 438 friends at Cornell. Now, she is a very social girl but I highly doubt that she is actually friends with half of them. Part of Facebook though is the number of friends you have- so skillfully displayed on the left side of the screen for all to see when they visit your page. The other part I noticed was her relationship status. She has been dating her boyfriend for a long period of time, but right now she has no relationship status. The funny thing about the relationship status, though, is that it gets changed on a regular basis. They seem to be “in a relationship” when they’re in a good mood/on good terms, but often have nothing at all if they’re fighting. This is a whole other issue of self-presentation.
Overall my friend’s profile is accurate; it is just the small things that may not be exactly true. It is hard to lie about assessment signals on Facebook, though, because there are plenty of pictures, and most people actually know you.
I had my friend rate each of her elements one through five. I then also ranked them, based on what I know about her from our friendship thus far. According to her, she was very honest. She ranked her basic info, contact info, activities, interests, and TV shows as fives, and her music and movies as fours. The things that she felt she had manipulated were conventional signals. This is not uncommon as people are selectively self-presenting everytime they edit their Facebook profile. (And we all know when you’re editing your profile because Newsfeed so graciously tells us).
For the most part I agreed with the numbers my friend ranked. The main discrepancy I saw was that in her activities she has five things listed, three of which she did in high school and does not participate in at Cornell.
There were two other things I noticed about her profile, that I didn’t address when I orginially asked her to rate her profile. The first is the number of friends she has. As I write this she has 438 friends at Cornell. Now, she is a very social girl but I highly doubt that she is actually friends with half of them. Part of Facebook though is the number of friends you have- so skillfully displayed on the left side of the screen for all to see when they visit your page. The other part I noticed was her relationship status. She has been dating her boyfriend for a long period of time, but right now she has no relationship status. The funny thing about the relationship status, though, is that it gets changed on a regular basis. They seem to be “in a relationship” when they’re in a good mood/on good terms, but often have nothing at all if they’re fighting. This is a whole other issue of self-presentation.
Overall my friend’s profile is accurate; it is just the small things that may not be exactly true. It is hard to lie about assessment signals on Facebook, though, because there are plenty of pictures, and most people actually know you.
Assignment 4 Option 1: Fake Vacation
For this assignment I talked to a friend online and on the phone. Each time we talked about a time I went on vacation with my family. However, while talking online, I was lying, and I made up an entire vacation. Afterwards I asked my friend if she could tell when I was lying and she incorrectly guessed that it was the vacation I described to her on the phone.
I spend a lot of time preparing my lie. I realized that I had to have a lot of details about the trip or else it would be too obvious that I was making it up. During my lie I mentioned specific "memories" such as how miserable we were when it rained and how I caught my first fish. These lies served to help convince my friend that the vacation really happened. Because I was lying while talking on aim, it was a bit easier to make the vacation sound real. I didn't have to worry about visual channels or tone while describing the trip. I also didn't have to worry as much about the time it took me to respond to a question. When chatting online, pauses are natural and expected so I usually took a little extra time to make sure my story was consistent. However, if I had been using a medium that was synchronous, any pause would have been very suspicious. Thus when I was telling about the true vacation on the phone, it was very easy for me to avoid anything that would indicate a lie. I didn't even have to think about it, it just came naturally.
After the experiment, I asked my friend how she choose which vacation was a lie. She said her main way of distinguishing the trips was the amount of detail involved in the stories. This was interesting because one would expect there to have been more details in the real vacation, but there ended up being more details when I was talking about the false vacation because I spent so much time planning out what had "happened".
Social Distance theory predicts that in general people are more likely to lie when using instant messages or email. I found that it was rather easy to lie when using instant messaging and I'm sure it would be even easier if using email due to its asynchronous nature. Instant messaging is also a fairly lean medium which also helps make it easier to lie.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5400576841210402935&postID=2141654875358656035
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5400576841210402935&postID=8915623592154873983
I spend a lot of time preparing my lie. I realized that I had to have a lot of details about the trip or else it would be too obvious that I was making it up. During my lie I mentioned specific "memories" such as how miserable we were when it rained and how I caught my first fish. These lies served to help convince my friend that the vacation really happened. Because I was lying while talking on aim, it was a bit easier to make the vacation sound real. I didn't have to worry about visual channels or tone while describing the trip. I also didn't have to worry as much about the time it took me to respond to a question. When chatting online, pauses are natural and expected so I usually took a little extra time to make sure my story was consistent. However, if I had been using a medium that was synchronous, any pause would have been very suspicious. Thus when I was telling about the true vacation on the phone, it was very easy for me to avoid anything that would indicate a lie. I didn't even have to think about it, it just came naturally.
After the experiment, I asked my friend how she choose which vacation was a lie. She said her main way of distinguishing the trips was the amount of detail involved in the stories. This was interesting because one would expect there to have been more details in the real vacation, but there ended up being more details when I was talking about the false vacation because I spent so much time planning out what had "happened".
Social Distance theory predicts that in general people are more likely to lie when using instant messages or email. I found that it was rather easy to lie when using instant messaging and I'm sure it would be even easier if using email due to its asynchronous nature. Instant messaging is also a fairly lean medium which also helps make it easier to lie.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5400576841210402935&postID=2141654875358656035
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5400576841210402935&postID=8915623592154873983
Assignment 4 - Opt 2 "Honestly?"
For the purposes of this assignment, I took to analyzing a friend's Facebook and MySpace profiles, having her assess the accuracy of profile information, and then cross-referencing the two resulting sets of data to find evidence indicative of the theories discussed in class. Facebook information that was analyzed include: profile picture, status updates, general info, friend list, group list, contact info, personal info, and educational info. MySpace was analyzed base on her Details section, which includes information like her relationship status, sexual orientation, body type, and more.
First, I had my friend evaluate the accuracy of the information that she provided on the social networking sites, based on the 1 to 5 scale, and then I averaged the results that she gave. Her Facebook profile averaged a 4.9 and her MySpace averaged close to 3.5. My estimated accuracies averaged in at 4.2 and 3.2 for Facebook and MySpace respectively.
As I anticipated, the majority of her inaccurate or manipulated information was found in
the conventional signals, which are characteristics of an individual that are only conventionally associated. These were found in the sections of her Facebook profile which dealt with personal interests and activities, group affiliations, and friend associations. Many of her activities and interests are purely fluff, were something that she added on a flight of fancy or with which she was briefly infatuated, or were items that had yet to be removed--generally, they were interests and activities that do not accurately portray who she is, as I have known her. When it came to her group and friend associations, she made it perfectly clear that many of those "Facebook friends" are not people who she actually considers to be friends (in fact, she doesn't know many of them). Most of the groups that she belongs to were added with little thought and should not be taken as seriously considered affiliations.
Assessment signals were manipulated in her MySpace profile, where she posted inaccurate height and body type--something I was able to confirm through measurement. There were many other items on her MySpace profile that were blatantly false, and when I asked her about this, she stated that she doesn't use her MySpace account in anticipation of actually interacting with any of the people with whom she is friends. On Facebook, however, she is much more likely to come face to face with those she is friends with, and so she is much more careful in her deception. This is highly suggestive of her need to not simply lie while on Facebook (to appear attractive to others), but to lie subtly and strategically (to appear honest to others).
Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-truth-unfolds-or-does-it.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/although-facebook-profiles-are-becoming.html
Assignment 4 Option 2: Fakebook?
Facebook profiles give people the ability sculpt their appearance and personalities to make people see them in a particular way. For this assignment, I investigated the profile of one of my friends to find out if he was employing any deception strategies to enhance his self-presentation.
Overall, the elements of his profile were very truthful. The assessment signals (birthday, hometown, phone number) were unsurprisingly all rated 5 out of 5 by both of us. It seems like lying about this type of easily verifiable information on Facebook would be a fruitless endeavor, because one's close friends have access to the information and could instantly detect when something is incorrect.
The conventional signals - such as interests and favorite music - were slightly less truthful. He rated some of his favorite television shows and music choices 3 or 4 out of 5. None of these were really intended to be dishonest; for example, it just so happens that he believes some of the TV shows that he listed have recently fallen in quality.
One particular facet of his profile, though, was a clear (but benign) attempt to selectively self-present a particular aspect of his personality. He listed only one favorite movie - a kids' film that he had enjoyed watching while growing up. He and I both rated this a 3 out of 5. While it's certainly not the case that he dislikes the movie, listing only that one by itself seemingly emphasizes a playful, ironic aspect of his personality.
If we analyze this using the feature based approach of deception production, Facebook would be similar to email. It's distributed, asynchronous, and has a record (you can delete information, but that's essentially the same as not having written it in the first place). As such, one might expect Facebook profiles to have a low frequency of lies. Indeed, my friend produced very infrequent deception and nothing that could be construed as an outright lie. For this reason, the magnitudes of the deceptions were rated quite low.
Comments:
Overall, the elements of his profile were very truthful. The assessment signals (birthday, hometown, phone number) were unsurprisingly all rated 5 out of 5 by both of us. It seems like lying about this type of easily verifiable information on Facebook would be a fruitless endeavor, because one's close friends have access to the information and could instantly detect when something is incorrect.
The conventional signals - such as interests and favorite music - were slightly less truthful. He rated some of his favorite television shows and music choices 3 or 4 out of 5. None of these were really intended to be dishonest; for example, it just so happens that he believes some of the TV shows that he listed have recently fallen in quality.
One particular facet of his profile, though, was a clear (but benign) attempt to selectively self-present a particular aspect of his personality. He listed only one favorite movie - a kids' film that he had enjoyed watching while growing up. He and I both rated this a 3 out of 5. While it's certainly not the case that he dislikes the movie, listing only that one by itself seemingly emphasizes a playful, ironic aspect of his personality.
If we analyze this using the feature based approach of deception production, Facebook would be similar to email. It's distributed, asynchronous, and has a record (you can delete information, but that's essentially the same as not having written it in the first place). As such, one might expect Facebook profiles to have a low frequency of lies. Indeed, my friend produced very infrequent deception and nothing that could be construed as an outright lie. For this reason, the magnitudes of the deceptions were rated quite low.
Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-breakdown.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-for-college-league-of-its.html
Assignment 4 Option 2: Everybody’s Doing It
It seems that everyone around us does it, uses it, contributes to it, and the desperate few even rely on it. It being Facebook, that is. However, just because of Facebook’s mass popularity and large user base does not mean it is a credible source of personal information about the people you “friend.” Identity and message based deception have a real presence on facebook, and for me it was surprising to see that even my close friends changed small personal identity facts to produce a certain appearance on their profile. Digital deception is the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of a message, and that is the type of deception we are addressing in the discussion because it is done in a mediated way.
For this assignment I asked one of my closest friends to rate the accuracy of everything on their facebook profile on a numeric scale. 1 being the least accurate and 5 being completely accurate, and then I averaged the data. Overall for her facebook profile she resulted in a self-accuracy score of 4.7. After that, I cross-checked her profile for what I knew to be true. My quantitative analysis of her profile rang in at a 4.4.
I found that the most “manipulated” information on her profile were the conventional signals, which are the displays that are only conventionally associated with a characteristic. Because they are not directly related to her (sometimes biological) characteristics they are easier to change, which are assessment signals. The majority of her “activities” listed were more or less clubs and sports that she tried once, but then never participated in again. She portrays herself as a very community-service oriented and active person, but because I knowing her so well I know she really doesn’t place emphasis on those commitments anymore. There was one major assessment signal that was flawed as well, under her networks and email information she listed her college that she recently left. The school is an excellent institution, but because of personal reasons she left. Although by the examination of her profile one could infer she is still in attendance there because of her .edu email address.
Her situation is not unique though, I feel as if many people list interests, activities, and music that reflects their ought self versus our actual selves. It is easy to do this though because like the argument the Social Distance Theory discusses, the more distance between two individuals the more opportunity there is for more deception. I feel that the distance also opens the door for the practice of more selective self-presentation. In fact, after this little experiment I feel that distance may be one of the main contributing factors to online selective presentation. What is chosen to be presented only gets harder to verify as distance or mediation (or both) increases. My friend has moved far away from a lot of our high school friends, like I have so perhaps she feels that no one know if she doesn’t do what is on her profile.
Links to my comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-opt-2-honestly.html#comments
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-for-college-league-of-its.html#comments
For this assignment I asked one of my closest friends to rate the accuracy of everything on their facebook profile on a numeric scale. 1 being the least accurate and 5 being completely accurate, and then I averaged the data. Overall for her facebook profile she resulted in a self-accuracy score of 4.7. After that, I cross-checked her profile for what I knew to be true. My quantitative analysis of her profile rang in at a 4.4.
I found that the most “manipulated” information on her profile were the conventional signals, which are the displays that are only conventionally associated with a characteristic. Because they are not directly related to her (sometimes biological) characteristics they are easier to change, which are assessment signals. The majority of her “activities” listed were more or less clubs and sports that she tried once, but then never participated in again. She portrays herself as a very community-service oriented and active person, but because I knowing her so well I know she really doesn’t place emphasis on those commitments anymore. There was one major assessment signal that was flawed as well, under her networks and email information she listed her college that she recently left. The school is an excellent institution, but because of personal reasons she left. Although by the examination of her profile one could infer she is still in attendance there because of her .edu email address.
Her situation is not unique though, I feel as if many people list interests, activities, and music that reflects their ought self versus our actual selves. It is easy to do this though because like the argument the Social Distance Theory discusses, the more distance between two individuals the more opportunity there is for more deception. I feel that the distance also opens the door for the practice of more selective self-presentation. In fact, after this little experiment I feel that distance may be one of the main contributing factors to online selective presentation. What is chosen to be presented only gets harder to verify as distance or mediation (or both) increases. My friend has moved far away from a lot of our high school friends, like I have so perhaps she feels that no one know if she doesn’t do what is on her profile.
Links to my comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-opt-2-honestly.html#comments
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-for-college-league-of-its.html#comments
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