Designing a Facebook profile is a fine art of selective self presentation. Now that Zuckerberg has opened his world of tagging and poking to everybody, users craft their profiles into the masterpieces that are displayed to their friends, family and even employers. In terms of sheer facts, Facebook does not give much leeway to deception as users normally have friends who can verify or disprove the facts. Identity based deception with assessment signals is harder to pull off due to validation by email address (though at one point I was friends with Sisqo). Conventional signals are where its at.
Interviewing my friend on her Facebook profile seemed to catch my friend off guard as it should. Knowing her as a pretty honest person I didn’t expect to find anything outrageous. As I expected, she gave herself 4s and 5s on most of the conventional signals with the lowest being her groups. However, if I analyzed her profile from a person who had not met her Ftf there are major differences. While they are not explicitly labeled as being listed in terms of importance, the order in which her interests led me to form a different image of her. Even though none of the items listed were false, I know for a fact that she does not like sports more than she likes eating food (if you are reading that does not mean you are fat). Maybe she wanted to appear more guy friendly or more athletic, two nontraditional gendered goals. I thought it was amusing that another post mentioned “...she failed to list her intense love for burping loudly” which definitely fits my friend as well. For some reason she is very liberal in joining groups and usually accepts any incoming group invitations. We had anywhere from “Crazy Frat PARTY 2007!!” to three “I’m a moron and I lost my phone again”. This combined with a disproportionally large number of pictures at social gatherings leads me to believe that her drunken, phone losing weekends start on Wednesday nights. Looking at her profile I would never have guessed that she is not photogenic (the magic of untagging). Also, on the contrary to her profile picture, she doesn’t normally wear that much makeup or crazy halter tops. As far as the attractiveness vs. honesty dialectic goes in this case, I would say that attractiveness rules with an iron fist.
In my experience, Facebook often has a polarizing effect supporting the hyperpersonal model. I can’t count how many profiles I’ve come across that might as well as have had “douchebag” stamped on their foreheads due to my biased opinion. It would be interesting to see if there was a correlation between gender and hyperpersonal opinions. Even though Facebook has more closely linked friends than online dating profiles, subtle lies are still common which supports Catalina’s study. I suppose this is because you would have to be a total loser to call somebody out on their Facebook profile. “Yo Brahh, on your profile you forgot to say you like Cher. Dude, I know you do man, you listen to her all the time.”
3 comments:
I think that you raise a really interesting point in that the order we list our interests in on our Facebook profile can actually say a lot about us; that’s a really interesting insight and another very small way to be deceptive online through selective self presentation. I think it would be interesting to see though if people are actually choosing to type their interests in a deliberate order or if that’s just the order in which their interests came to mind as they were filling out their profile. I agree with what you say at the end about Facebook really supporting the hyperpersonal model and pulling our impressions of others out to the extremes. Like you said in Facebook we have people that we interact with face-to-face on a daily basis and this plays a major role in keeping us honest, to a certain extent, on Facebook because we don’t want to appear as a liar to our friends.
Hey Austin! I thought it was really funny that as I was reading your blog I saw you quoted mine in it when talking about your friend’s love for burping. And I have come to think that many people have this same habit and wonder if it exists on any facebook profile. Analyzing the order in which your friend listed her interests is a very telling thing about a person because when looking at my own profile I will admit that I list my interests starting with the ones I am most interested in/passionate about. It seems that your friend used her own self-presentation tactics to portray certain aspects about herself, and I thought it was interesting that you never associate her with wearing that much makeup or halter tops. That picture is the first impression that people get when they see a profile so obviously your friend used the sets, props, and lighting of her picture to display a specific image of herself.
Hey Austin, my favorite COMM 245 experiment partner, how are you? I felt that it was appropriate to comment on your post since we are best buds now, you know, after our intense experiment and all. Funny post; your friend seems…really cool…especially the burping. Nothing gets me going more than a girl who can make me lightheaded from her burps. I thought you made a great point concerning the order in which people present information on their facebook profile. I think that aspect definitely ties into Goffman’s Self Presentation Goals theory. Like we learned in class, these goals can be affected by the gender of the individual. However, we may be overanalyzing your friend’s profile because if she is anything like me, she may not have really put much time or care into her profile. Your friend could have just wanted to set up the profile quickly. With that being said, the Hyperpersonal model still applies. Regardless if the few facts in a CMC interaction are actually true, the impression developer may still form, like you said, a polarized opinion.
Post a Comment