Deception is a part of everyone’s daily life. In an average day, we deceive someone 1.96 times, and do it over just about any type of communication medium. Deception becomes especially important for networking and dating websites like facebook or match.com or anything else that has you create a personal profile. As we learned in class there is often a certain degree of deception involved in these types of profiles. Why would people put false information or bend the truth on these pages? Because they want to be liked. By changing the information displayed about yourself, you can manage the impressions others get of you and hopefully make them like you more.
On a facebook profile, almost all the information is in the form of conventional signals, with hardly any assessment signals. Basically everything someone chooses to display on your profile can be changed by the user as a form of impression management. Things that are assessment signals in ftf communication, like your physical appearance, can be easily changed in facebook. You just change your profile picture to whatever you want and untag/delete all the pictures you don’t want. Actually, the only piece of information in a facebook profile that can’t be easily changed to whatever you want is who you are friends with or in a relationship with (because they both require the other person to approve it as well). This means that you could easily create a completely fake profile. Naturally nobody does this, however, because nobody wants to get caught in a lie. Therefore, most digital deceptions in these profiles are small, and hard to prove.
For this assignment, I looked at one of my friend’s facebook profile and had him rate it as we learned in class. He gave himself a score of a 4.8, citing a little bit of fudging on the “Interests” and “Favorite Music” sections. I rated him as well and gave his profile a 4.7, finding deceptions in the same places he did. Basically, he tried to edit his personal information to highlight how artistic he is: writing, poetry, traveling, etc, while leaving out things I would have put on if I had written his profile: comics, warcraft…. A similar thing happened in the favorite music category. He listed Johnny Cash, Iron and Wine, and the Pixies on there, when I have only heard him listen to whiney emo tunes. Given that the rest of his profile was pretty accurate, I would say that neither the frequency nor the magnitude of deception in his profile were too big. Everybody wants to present themselves in a good manner, so I expect a certain degree of innocent fiction in people’s profiles. At the same time, nobody wants to get caught in a lie, so most deceptions tend to be very minor ones.
1 comment:
Logan,
I think your post was insightful; however, I don’t believe that we lie in order to be liked. Some people put false information on their profiles to convey a certain personality, a certain self (“ought”, “ideal”, etc.) so to speak. It’s not about viewers “liking” you but categorizing you and formulating an impression, whether negative or positive. I do agree that profiles (like those on Facebook) contain mainly conventional signals. I can understand why you would classify relationship status as an assessment signal; however, I think that you can set it to whatever you want (just so long as it doesn’t include another person’s name), so it is somewhat easy to manipulate in the online world.
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