I've gone through several personal opinions of facebook throughout college. When I made my first profile, I just tried to answer the questions accurately. Then I realized that almost every single friend I made in college would see my profile, so I edited it to make myself look better. Soon after that, I realized that I hated myself for being a conformist, and went back to writing what actually described me. When I look at anyone's profile, more than looking at their actual information, I tend to try and evaluate what they're trying to show me. Are they trying to look cooler than they are, more attractive, accurately present themselves, just goof around?
My friend, C, that I interviewed had similar opinions about facebook, but not nearly as strong as mine. He updated his profile often to try and keep it accurate. In accordance with that, he gave high accuracy ratings, fours and fives, to every element in his profile. In fact, the only specific thing he could point out as not being true was the inclusion of the band "Ok Go" in his music section, because he only had 9 of their songs.
I know him fairly well and I couldn't find anything in his profile that would be deceptive to a stranger. His profile picture is him dressed as a gangsta rapper of sorts, but it's pretty clear that it's a joke, so I don't count that as deceptive. Since I didn't find much deception, my friend's profile fits the Richness theory stating that lying is ambiguous and therefore requires a rich media. That's the only theory I see agreeing with this, even though I feel that he just isn't a big liar.
Although pretty much everything on facebook can be forged, there are some standard assessment signals like domain of email address (@cornell.edu...). Any picture can be used, so lying is almost effortless. Interests, movies, books, movies, religion, political views, and major are similarly fakeable.
I believe that there are more important conventional signals than favorite quotes. Some people may consider seeing "going for walks" in a profile's interests section meaningful, but I'm much more influenced by different signals. For instance, the size of somebody's profile can give you an idea of how much time they spend adding to and tweaking their info. If I see one of my friends updating their profile every day and they have 100 entries under their "favorite" books, I'm personally likely to believe a) that there are a lot of subtle lies and b) they are a little too into their online persona. On the other hand, somebody who lists a few interests, a few books, a few quotes, and doesn't describe themselves as "a chill person" in their "about me" will earn a gold star in my impression formation notebook. I would believe that they spend a reasonable (read: small) amount of time on facebook and they don't see it as the end all be all of their social life.
The main point I'm trying to make here is that there are lots of signals facebook users encounter that aren't as straightforward as "interests" or "favorite books". Most of these are probably conventional (I can make my profile ridiculously short to convince people I'm too cool for facebook) but I think that with these slightly more subconscious decisions, the true self tends to come out more.
Comments: http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-looking-at-facebook.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-believe-only-half-of-what-you-see.html
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2 comments:
Rich, great post. I completely agree with your analysis of facebook. There are other indicators on facebook about a persons’ personality besides what they write. If a person has 700 friends it is fairly likely that they don’t know most of them. It also says that they probably spend so much time facebooking that they don’t really have too many friends in real life.
You can tell when people spend too much time working on their profile. Chances are if someone is going to lie about in a profile that is closely tied to there picture and personal information, they are going to put some though into it. And the people that don’t put that much time into it probably don’t care enough to lie. From what I have seen it seems like most of the time when casual users lie in their profile it is either contained to just their picture or is due to the fact that their tastes have changed since they last updated.
Richard,
I really like the way you delve deeper than simply reading people's directly stated interests and attributes. I feel like, on your part, this may be a conscious or unconscious recognition that people DO lie about the factors that are most easily manipulated on facebook, and you try to assess the things that are harder to "fake".
Some of what you were saying actually goes with what I hinted at in my post; that the amount of time people spend on facebook (or, in your case, how much attention they devote to their facebook) can be a revealing factor in the way they act or feel in real-life situations. It also appears, from your analysis of your friends' profile, that your particular instance did not seem to prove either theory. While your friend may be a rare case, I think since facebook IS more connected to real-life (i.e. facebook conversations and friendships are carried over to face-to-face), people feel more accountable for the validity of their pages.
Great job! :)
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