Overall, the elements of his profile were very truthful. The assessment signals (birthday, hometown, phone number) were unsurprisingly all rated 5 out of 5 by both of us. It seems like lying about this type of easily verifiable information on Facebook would be a fruitless endeavor, because one's close friends have access to the information and could instantly detect when something is incorrect.
The conventional signals - such as interests and favorite music - were slightly less truthful. He rated some of his favorite television shows and music choices 3 or 4 out of 5. None of these were really intended to be dishonest; for example, it just so happens that he believes some of the TV shows that he listed have recently fallen in quality.
One particular facet of his profile, though, was a clear (but benign) attempt to selectively self-present a particular aspect of his personality. He listed only one favorite movie - a kids' film that he had enjoyed watching while growing up. He and I both rated this a 3 out of 5. While it's certainly not the case that he dislikes the movie, listing only that one by itself seemingly emphasizes a playful, ironic aspect of his personality.
If we analyze this using the feature based approach of deception production, Facebook would be similar to email. It's distributed, asynchronous, and has a record (you can delete information, but that's essentially the same as not having written it in the first place). As such, one might expect Facebook profiles to have a low frequency of lies. Indeed, my friend produced very infrequent deception and nothing that could be construed as an outright lie. For this reason, the magnitudes of the deceptions were rated quite low.
Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-breakdown.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-for-college-league-of-its.html
2 comments:
What a thought provoking post, Evan! I think your comparison of Facebook to email was very intriguing. Because Facebook is essentially a combination of various communication techniques (messaging, status updates, etc.), it has the ability to have both identity-based and message-based deception. We can intentionally control what kind of information or message we are putting out there for our friends and other people in our networks to see. I found it interesting when you said that your friend listed a show that they don’t enjoy as much as before because I know that some people leave their profiles (especially activities) filled with things they did in the past but don’t really do now. Although it’s not a lie, it is deceiving because we tend to think that that section is reserved for the present. Great post, you really got me thinking!
I thought that your post was quite interesting. It is insightful that you realized people are much more likely to lie about conventional signals that are less easily verifiable. I also liked how you linked profile deception to the desire to selectively self present online.
One thing that I think could be improved is the link between your experience and the theory that we have studied in class. It would have been interesting if you had drawn the link between your experience and Catalina's study or the Hyperpersonal Model.
It seems that your results were slightly divergent from Catalina's. Although your friend had a small magnitude of lies, the number of lies was very small, in contrast to Catalina's finding that the frequency of lies on Facebook profiles is usually quite large due to the goal of appearing attractive.
Overall it was a great post to read.
Danielle Rosenthal
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