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