This semester has been giving me several opportunities to, shall we say, study the art that is Facebook. So of course, I eagerly chose the option to deduce the anatomy of a Facebook profile. My method was simple: after signing on iChat and initiating conversation with one of my best friends, I asked her if I could interview her on the accuracy of her Facebook profile. Within seconds she complied and I gave her somewhat of a rubric in order to complete my survey. Scoring each element from 1 to 5 (1 being a blatant lie, 5 being completely honest), my friend rated the different aspects of her Facebook profile. I then compared her assessment, to my own opinion of how accurately her Facebook reflects her true self.
Overall, my friend had rated her Facebook at 3.6. I consider this to be relatively low since she doesn't blatantly lie at all on her profile (believe me, I'd know). However, upon making my own assessment of her Facebook profile, it became incredibly clear that my friend was cultivating a specific image of herself with the various conventional signals expressed through Facebook. Rather than focusing on her wide range of hobbies, my friend's Facebook profile really hones in on the fact that she is somewhat of a hippie (her quotes are "namaste" as well as a spiritually charged message from Buddha). While the hippie characteristic is absolutely a part of my friend's persona, I would never venture to say it is her only notable quality. However, based on her profile, this certainly seems to be the case.
While she never actually expresses false information, my friend's selective self-presentation causes her profile to evade a very specific personality. This is fitting with the Hyperpersonal Model which includes the act of self-presentation as a way in which people appear to be an exaggerated version of what they are due to a lack of information. In my friend's case, the lack of information happened to be descriptions of non-hippy activities, music, etc.
Additionally, my friend's profile supports Catalina's findings that most people lie, but on a small scale in online personals. While my friend may have left out unfavorable information, or information which did not fit in with a certain persona, this selective-presentation is of small magnitude compared with the fact that she could have completely made up information on her profile. However, not keeping with Catalina's study, my friend actually rated herself fairly low on accuracy. So, at least she's sort of being honest... right?
My Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-newsfeed-from-fb-profiler.html
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http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-for-college-league-of-its.html
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2 comments:
It's very interesting that your friend chose to focus her Facebook profile on such a small subset of her personality traits and personal interests, prompting such a low accuracy score. It would be nice to study how common this type of behavior is on Facebook. I suppose the difference between Facebook and dating sites is that on Facebook, one may not be as concerned with possible future interaction as he or she might be when creating a dating profile and thus is willing to take more liberties in describing him or herself. It's much safer to mold your persona in this way because the risks are much lower.
I’m surprised that your friend was so modest about rating the accuracy of her profile; my friend gave herself a slightly higher score than I would have. The fact is, based on the description of your friend’s profile, she lied by omission, and I don’t think that lying by omission is the same as blatant lying. She chose to selectively self present herself, apparently as a hippie. Why do you think she focused so much on portraying herself as a hippie, when I’m sure that she has other significant qualities? Does she present herself the same way in person? It would be interesting to find out whether or not it is common for people to selectively self present themselves similar to how they present themselves on their Facebook profiles.
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