Assignment 4, Option 2. My friend "Boon"

The facebook profile is slowly becoming more real than your actual self - for example, you are only dating a person if facebook says so. Otherwise it’s not “official”. Because of this interesting change, people are starting to use facebook as a solid introduction to their own personality traits. The first thing new friends do is scavenge each other’s profiles for interesting information. What that means is there is now a huge new venue to easily exercise selective self presentation and subtle deception. Since there are no non-verbal or physiological cues on facebook, it’s easier to fool others.

To look at this further, I analyzed the profile of a good friend - let’s call him Boon. Boon is an average guy who has a lot of friends and uses facebook a lot as a communication tool so he was perfect for this. I did not tell him exactly what I was looking for, but he promised to honestly answer all my questions. First, he ranked all entries of his profile on a scale of 1-5. There were 15 areas to rank total and he chose 5 for 13 of those, and 3 for the remaining two. The first 3 was about height. While his profile says he is 6’1, he is actually closer to 5’11 in reality. He explained that in real life he wears boots a lot, and those easily add an inch or two to his height so he likes to appear taller. This fits perfectly with our class discussion - this lie was subtle as very few people can tell the difference when he has boots on and it was “frequent” in a sense that it appears on all his online profiles and to his friends that is his height. It’s a classic example of selective self-presentation and also showcases that males do in fact like to lie about their height. This probably occurs because such subtle lies are not noticed and facebook provides a huge medium for them to spread.

The other 3 was for his music tastes. While 8 of the 9 bands he had listed on his profile were indeed bands he liked, one was a blatant lie. As it turns out, a girl he has a crush on loves this band (pussycat dolls) and he listed it on his profile so they have something in common. This is a great example of the Self-Presentation Goals definitions by Goffman and Baumeister. Goal number one is to appear attractive, which Boon accomplishes because the girl likes him a lot more for that one little band addition. Goal two is to appear honest. This one is harder - Boon does not actually like the band. However, since he knows most of their contact is through facebook (an asynchronous method of communication) he can deal with it by reading up on the band if she ever inquires him about it. The other 8 bands listed are correct, so really it’s a very small lie that will probably go unnoticed. The last goal is gender differences, though this does not apply here. Both sexes enjoy partners who like similar music. However, the boot height example I described above fits that well.

So what conclusions can I draw from this one example? Well, first of all CMC communication offers more ways for us to lie. Because our profiles are now viewable by all, the theoretical number of people that will read and believe subtle lies regarding conventional signals goes up very high. Hyperpersonal theory says that people make much stronger first impressions in CMC communication. This means that we will want only our best to be on this “profile”. It actually gives us more incentive to lie because we can impress people who only communicate with us through CMC without any consequences. Yes, our real friends might point out some subtle things wrong with our profile but those can be brushed off in other subtle lies FTF. The second conclusion is that people won’t lie about everything. As the CMC self presentation goals we discussed in class indicate, we will lie very subtly and frequently online but, to use my friend Boon, never list 9 fake bands on our interests page. One is fine because it’s so subtle!