For this assignment, I investigated the accuracy of a friend’s Facebook, in its entirety. I made sure that my friend, who from this point forth will be referred to as “the subject”, had set a significant amount of time aside in order to take part in the in depth questioning. At first, the subject seemed reluctant to allot the requested amount of time for the interview but I kept insisting and eventually succeeded. The subject’s immediate response to my task at hand was, “I don’t know why you think, it’ll take that long, I don’t lie on my Facebook”. After a thorough sweep of the subject’s profile and life, I came to the conclusion that the subject’s first few words had not been a lie.
Recently, the subject had updated and removed a significant amount of superfluous (potentially inaccurate) information from their profile. The breakdown in terms of Catalina’s study yielded as follows:
All contact information: 5
Pictures: 5
Groups: 5
Interests/Personal information: 5
Everything else: 5
During my verification process, I was convinced that the information provided was in fact accurate. I could not find a lie on the profile. This was as I had expected.
Based on the results, I would say that the Recordability of a Facebook profile kept the subject from presenting any inaccurate information on it. Since my subject is very self-confident, there was no need for an alteration in the presentation. The one thing that was mentioned was that previously the subject had joined many groups that were not necessarily an accurate representation of the subject’s interest. Therefore, prior to my interview, the subject’s profile had agreed with the experiment in that small lies were quite honest and very infrequent.
Overall, my friend’s profile barely showed any lies and the very few lies were conventional signals (groups) that had been manipulated. I believe that it is Facebook’s very nature that promotes accurate assessment signals. One must have a valid email address, others know you and may be able to keep track of any inaccuracies, it is recordable and it’s mostly used to network between friends to whom people do not feel the need to display an improved self-presentation masking their insecurities. The only things that can successfully be manipulated are the groups one joins (since they’re not taken seriously in the first place when assessing an individual’s interests).
Yea, I wish he had lied some more, talking to him was boring.http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-opt-1-true-or-false-type.html
http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-option-1-its-officialim-bad-liar.html
1 comment:
Hi Taek, you have an intriguing post here and I find it interesting that your friend rated a 5 in all the categories. While it is definitely possible that none of the elements of his profile were necessarily "lies," they still could have been carefully chosen answers, used as a means of selectively-self presenting himself by perhaps picking out his best qualities for everyone on facebook that he doesn't know personally, to over-attribute on. I may be wrong, but believe the study we learned about in class stated that while we lie subtly in this kind of CMC environment, we also lie frequently, so as to appear most attractive without seeming too dishonest. So in the case of your friend's particular facebook profile choices, while this may not necessarily be seen as deceptive, it can still be a way of presenting himself in a particular way by including certain traits/likes/dislikes, and leaving others out, regardless of the fact that the statements may be true. Just based on the limitations of the medium, there's no way that we could possibly include everything about ourselves in our profiles to portray ourselves in the most accurate way. So while we may try to be accurate, and may not include any right out lies, we still have to choose what to include and what to leave out, which will most likely leave the viewers with some sort of version of our "ideal self."
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