The New "Face" of Digital Deception-Assignment #4

When I asked my friend to be my Facebook subject for this assignment he was a bit puzzled, he didn't seem to think that there was anything that could be false on his profile. Either way, I had him fill out a survey rating his "truthfulness" on the 1-5 scale that Catalina had utilized for her experiment. After my friend finished his part I also assessed how truthful he was. Some immediate things I noticed that evolved from the use of Facebook is that many usual assessment signals such as age, gender, and physical features were clearly harder to fake than they would be in say, a chat room. This of course is attributed to both the fact that the network allows for a place to put your own picture, and that the friends network is usually all people a person knows, therefore making it more difficult to lie about these characteristics. There were also some conventional signals that were hard to lie about due to the same reasons as mentioned before, these included education and hometown.
Overall, I was unsure how Catalina actually calculated her frequency, so I did an arbitrary calculation by taking an average. In my calculations, my subject lied 50% of the time, but the magnitude of his lies did not vary greatly from the actual truth and were therefore quite subtle. My discovery of where he lied the most and in greatest magnitude were his about me, activities, friends wheel and groups. His about me was very sparse and contained things that did not pertain to his personality at all. One of his activities which I highly disagreed with and he also admitted to being a complete lie was his participation in the "Moral Fiber Club." Though he is moral in many ways, he does not fulfill the standards of the club and therefore is not a member so to speak. Also, he did not choose to add many of the academic activities he was involved with, even though it may not always be viewed as an actual lie, there was definitely a withholding of information. In addition, his friends wheel included many people that he only knew by acquaintance and some he had never even held a conversation with. Lastly, many of the groups he was a member in did not represent a lot of who he was.
I would have to say that my friend's Facebook profile, like so many others out there (including mine) work along the selective self-presentation theory. My friend chose to show the good side of him through the activities he was a part of and the profile picture he chose, as well as the low emphasis on other parts of himself in self-description. I felt that he also wanted to be viewed as popular by having the friends wheel, certain groups he was a part of, and other applications that are deemed as "cooler." This aspect could be supported by the idea of social association, there was a lot of BIRGing and CORFing because he did not show his affiliations with some of his "geekier" activities. In accordance with the deception strategies that are expected in digital deception, I would say that deception is definitely frequent but subtle. The frequency of my friend's lies were pretty high, but he kept them subtle. This is due to the honesty factor because he is likely to see many of the people who view his profile on a regular basis.
Overall, I do not think that when many of the theories were created that they accounted for CMC spaces such as Facebook. This social network makes it much more difficult to lie because many of the people one stays connected with are friends or colleagues. Also,
Facebook is a possible venue for your future employers to access and thus further supports the self-presentational theory. Therefore, although digital deception is easier accomplished via leaner media, it's ease varies among the various online spaces.

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