4: Looking at Facebook

When I first reviewed this assignment the first thing I did was examine my own profile. After examining my profile I found that I did not really have much to lie about because my own profile was pretty sparse. Except for my profile picture in which I am dressed up from a formal, I felt that due to the lack of information, it was fairly representative of me.

For this assignment I examined my friend’s facebook profile. To protect his identity I’ll refer to him by his initials RHR. RHR is interesting in the fact that he has two profiles. He has one that very well represents him. He updates it often so it is fairly up to date and he does not seem to have any interest in exaggerating the truth. When I had him rate each part he averaged a 4.9 overall. When I tried to grade it myself I came out to the same conclusion.

RHR’s second profile is one that he made a couple months ago as a joke. He wanted to see if he could make a profile to hit on girls with. He replaced a picture of himself with someone that looked taller and stronger. He then filled his profile with completely fake information including multiple varsity sports, volunteering at different charities, and anything else that he thought could help. RHR then started friending girls and messaging them. The beauty of facebook is that most people put up real pictures of themselves so he could see how they really looked (even if they did select flattering photos) and at a school of over 10,000, there are over 5,000 girls to choose from. Many of them accepted his friending and many messaged back and forth with him. In addition to all the random people he friended, he also friended 2 girls that he knew pretty well (without them knowing it was him) and a girl that had rejected him in the past. Only the two he knew accepted and he had a bit of fun lying to them before he got bored and stopped using that profile. RHR’s fake profile is still online but he does not use it anymore.

RHR was able to lie in part due to the social distance theory. He was not face to face with the people he was talking to and they had no way to trace the conversation back to him. The beauty of facebook is that since it is so closely linked to people in most cases, most people do not suspect anyone would lie and therefore do not try to perform the deception detection they would otherwise. Media richness theory also played a roll in him not having to lie face to face. The conversations he had were asynchronous and recordable but he has no reason to be concerned with the fact that they were recordable because he had no attatchment to the profile. With RHRs real profile he does not mess with people. His real contact information is on that including his screenname, his email, and his cell phone number. It is associated with him and even though he does not know all of his 200 friends very well, everything he writes is recordable and depending on who he is talking to, the distance changes. However online with such distance there are no repercussions for him for lying so RHR does it.