#4 - the facebook dimension

Facebook is a recent development on the Internet that allows people to become friends, creating a network of internet users with a detailed profile of each user. A profile has a variety of attributes each user can choose to fill out in order to expand their profile. These entry fields provide signals about the user; its level of validity however is questionable. Certain fields are more viable; these assessment signals have a higher cost to falsify. The assessment signals listed below are also more costly since it can be verified by the people in the actual network or know the actual person. The following are assessment signals provided on the Facebook profile:

Assessment signals:

• name
• network
• birthday
• hometown
• contact info:
  email
  mobile
  current address
  residence
  school mailbox
  website
• Education
• Work Info

Other less credible fields are conventional signals. These signals have a lower cost and are easier to fake. Conventional signals on Facebook include:

Conventional Signals:

• profile pictures
• pictures
• groups
• interests
• "looking for" (in other users of Facebook)
• political views
• religious views
• friends list
• screenname for instant messaging program
• personal info:
  activities
  interests
  fav music
  fav tv shows
  fav movies
  fave books
  fav quotes
  about me
• applications
• status

Each of these fields are optional and can be removed from the user's profile except for List of friends, network(s), name, and email address. These fields are mostly assessment signals.

Based on these fields, I questioned my friend on the validity of his facebook profile. Not every field was shown. The following are the ratings he assigned along with my own ratings of the accuracy of his posted information.

Scale: 1(inaccurate) - 5(accurate)

Format: field name: his rating, my rating

networks: 5, 5
bday: 5, 5
hometown 5, 5
religious views: 5, 3
emails: 5, 5
profile pic: 5, 5
tagged pictures: 5, 5
interests: 5, 5
fave music: 5, 5
fave book: 2, 2
about me: 5, 5

groups: 5, 5
friends: 3, 3
name: 5, 3
fb apps:5, 4
education: 5, 4

In most instances, my friend gave himself a very accurate rating. The reason why he didn't give himself a 5 was for the sake of a joke, a harmless form of deception. When I decided to rate the accuracy of his profile, I felt some of the information was inaccurate because he presented certain aspects that portrayed him a different light than he really is.

The difference in ratings supports the Feature Based Approach. Facebook is asynchronous, keeps a record through mini-feed and news-feed, and most people in the Facebook network are not highly distributed. Due to these qualities, Feature Based Approach states that people are less likely to lie, which is the case for my friend's Facebook profile. Any lies that did occur were harmless lies intended as jokes and were obviously more of a joke than a lie, especially to his closer friends. This result also supports the Social Distance Theory since people who would view his profile are mostly friends nearby.

This does not follow the Media Richness Theory which states that people tend to lie in richer forms of media. Facebook is highly dense and rich but not many people lie about themselves.

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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3: Media Selection

In applying for a campus job, I was required to provide at least one campus or local reference, but as a new transfer student I have not yet built a strong enough rapport with any of my professors or TAs to offer their names. I felt like the best true reference I could offer of someone who could attest to my personality and work ethic was one from a girl in a class with whom I am working on a group project. To ask her permission for her reference, I gave her a call and left a voicemail figuring calling was most appropriate. I wanted her to understand the sincerity of my request and given our recent acquaintance I thought she would best understand if I used a “rich channel.” In response, she text me back and sent me a follow up e-mail to ensure I received her text. In her text, she apologized for not calling, explaining that she was in the library but that she was flattered by my consideration and to go ahead and use her name. I chose to respond to her text message in the interest of time (for her and my sake), saying, “Ur so great! Thank u! I’ll see u wed.” I knew that if I called my classmate back it would negatively affect her impression of me because I would be demonstrating a lack of consideration of her not wanting to talk while in the library which supports O’Sullivan’s model.


The second instance of media selection came this weekend in reinitiating contact with a recent ex-boyfriend. My goal in the communication was to apologize for the way things ended, to let him know that I was no longer upset over the whole ordeal, and to ask him to mail me some of my things. Knowing that he would want to talk and that I was not ready, I sent him an email figuring that a text message would be more likely to lead to a phone call because of its limited ability to convey the emotional consideration I knew I needed to express.

Both of these choices of media support O’Sullivan’s model and the Media Richness Theory. In both cases I wanted to manage my impression with each person as well as use channel that offered the appropriate dialectic. In the case of my ex-boyfriend, I wanted to create a “buffer” between the two of us to convey my comfort level, but I also wanted to make sure that I said what I needed to say without any interference or confusion. As for my classmate, I followed her lead on using the lean medium to express my understanding of her needs (time and environment) and convey my goals. I also wanted to ensure that I continued to present myself to her in a positive light.

3-- media selection: roommate situations

Resolving conflicts with roommates often can be challenging whether you live with close friends or random people. Over the summer, I took a class back in California. I ended up subletting with local students. Although they were nice people, we never became closer than strangers living together. In my 3 bedroom apartment, one resident failed to clean up after herself. She had odd hours working at a lab and I rarely ran into her. Avoiding conflict, I ended up doing dishes and cleaning up after her mess. One day, I decided I've had it enough. I left a note on the refrigerator asking would whoever left the dishes in the sink clean it up as it was starting to get gross? This built up tension. My apartmentmate called and left an angry voicemail asking if there's a problem, would I talk to her in person without leaving notes?

According to O'Sullivan model, communication method is determined by two factors: locus and valence. In this case, since my locus was on the other roommate and valence was negative, I chose a lean medium, leaving a note. My roommate also a negative locus and valence, but chose to call. The difference in my roommate and my actions reflect Lean Media Theory. I thought the situation was clear: asking to do dishes. However, my roommate chose a richer medium. She viewed the situation with more ambiguity, changing the focus from simple house chore responsibility to communication within the house.

In addition to valence and locus, I believe the degree of intimacy between two people also plays a role. At my current house, we have a white board on the refrigerator. However, we mainly use it for paying bills and updating each other on maintenance requests. I would choose to talk in person if I wanted to bring up doing dishes.

Su Cho

3--media selection

Media selection 1

Friday afternoon, when I realized that I hadn’t made any weekend plans except for writing a blog post for info 245, I decided to go to a movie. So I called my friend Heidi, and asked her if she wanted to go to a movie with me later. “Yeah, sure. Call me after you finish classes.” she said. So after all my classes, I called her again, and she was at home and ready to go. We met up at the bus station and went to the theater together. We chatted about our classes and complained about boys…having a very good time.

Media selection 2

After I got out of the theater, I found that I had two missed calls and a voice mail. They are all from another friend of mine. I am not really familiar with this guy. We met last semester in a house party and facebook message each other for several times. He called me on Monday asking if I wanted to hang out with him sometime, I missed his call and totally forgot to call back. This time he also left me a voice mail asking if I kept ignoring him for some reason, sounds kinda angry…
Frankly I was not really interested, but I felt badly acting rude. So I decided to facebook message him, apologize for not calling back and B.S about how busy I have been lately…

Media Richness Theory & O’Sullivan’s model

I sense my choices about media can be better explained under a mix of Media Richness Theory and O’Sullivan’s model.
In the first case, I chose rich media as telephone and FtF to catch up with my friends, because it is an ambiguous task and not in bad need of efficiency. This matches the Media Richness Theory, which suggests that people will choose media with different richness according to the equivocality of a communication task. People choose rich media for more equivocal tasks and lean media for less equivocal tasks.In the second case, I chose the media because I felt bad about not calling back. O’Sullivan’s model suggested that people’s media selections are influenced by two factors: locus (whether it’s about us or others) and the valence (whether the behavior is negative or positive). My locus is”me” and the valence is “negative”, and therefore I chose mediated media as Facebook message even though he used telephone and voicemail to communicate with me.

Assignment #3

Last semester, I lived in a house with 6 of my close friends. At the beginning of the year we had a house meeting to discuss living logistics. We talked about buying groceries, paying cable/internet bills, chores, etc. When it came to discussing how to keep our house clean, we all had slightly different opinions. Some of my friends were neat-freaks while others were more content with a ‘laissez-faire’ attitude when it came to things like vacuuming, cleaning dishes, and garbage. As for me, I fell into the neat-freak category. As you may suspect, this led to rising tensions within the house.

By the time the semester was in full swing, there were weeks where I would not see one of my roommates (I will call him RD) leading to piled up dirty dishes. RD is an extremely bright, over achieving engineer who holds a job and a research position on top of a cumbersome engineering curriculum. At first, I felt it necessary to talk to him face to face because this would show that I valued our friendship and I was approaching him directly. In line with Media Richness Theory, I chose rich communication with my friend because I wanted to read his feedback and get nonverbal cues. I wanted to make sure that he understood my intentions were of a friendly nature. On the other hand, O’Sullivan would have predicted a lean media because there is an expected negative valence by me sharing my complaints to my roommate.

However, it is difficult to decide which theory categorizes my behavior. Since the conversation was just a few words, (ie. “do your dishes please”), Media Richness would say a lean media would be sufficient because my communication was very direct and unambiguous. However, if I left a note taped to his door or left instant messages on his AIM, my intentions of giving him a friendly reminder might be misconstrued as me being antagonistic. In a face to face interaction, I was able to talk to him in a friendly manner through nonverbal cues.

Switching gears, I spent the past summer in Virginia (I’m from Boston) with an internship while my girlfriend stayed at Cornell to take summer classes. In our time apart, we chose to communicate via webcam and phone calls following the Media Richness Theory. We chose the richest media we thought possible to mimic our normal face to face communications. Also because our conversations were not direct and did not lend itself well for lean media such as instant messaging or text messaging. O’Sullivan would also predict the use of rich media because the expected valence for talking to my girlfriend would be positive.

#3 Looks (and texts) can be deceiving...

An author once wrote, "A conventional liar needs a good memory." When you take on an identity that is not your own, you need to remember every little detail you consciously or even subconsciously pass on to the other party in the conversation. This is a lot harder than telling the simple truths about yourself. Thus, impression management becomes a lot more difficult when you take on some identity other than your own.

I chose to go into a chatroom and pose as a male college student of 20 years of age because I figured this persona is different enough from my real person to be a challenge yet close enough that it wouldn't be as hard to manage as, say, a 50-year old neurosurgeon. I picked a conspicuously masculine name (Jaggernaut), more for my own sake so I could fit in more snuggly with this persona. I was surprised to discover that now I minded a lot more to whom I was actually talking. If it was a female, I had to make sure I don't let any feminine tone get across while not sounding like egoistic. If it was a male, I had to be careful not to overdo the "masculinity" of the persona so I could avoid detection. It was a very fine line to walk: between sounding too "sissy" and too "tough." Either would invite easy detection.

With the name "Jaggernaut," a lot fewer guys talked to me (contrary to previous chatroom visits). I'm used to letting others take the initiative and private message me, so this time I had to first go out of my comfort zone by PMing others, mostly girls. Maybe it was the nature of the chatroom I was in, but I always got the feeling that same-sex PMing doesn't happen a lot, so I didn't want to alert any guys by PMing them as a guy. That is perhaps one of the first crucial steps of my impression management.

As I started talking to various "girls" (for all I know, they could be "fakes" like me), I noticed that I had to initiate a lot of conversations by actively seeking them. Instead of being asked "ASL?", I was now the one to ask it, to be the pursuer instead of the pursued. I had to be a lot more willing to describe myself to get the other party to open up about themselves. Even with this "aggression," I tried to be as gentle as I could and not press my "masculinity" on anyone. I tried to make smart conversation instead of going after the sexual aspects, as so many guys in this chatroom are sometimes prone to do. I'm definitely more comfortable with smart conversation, but I also realize that it can be much more revealing and devastating to my deception as the other party digs deeper into my persona and I'm forced to uncover facets that may very well expose my ignorance in things my persona should have great knowledge in.

As I was describing my online deception adventure just now, I was quite surprised by how much this persona is my ought self, or at least the qualities I think a great conversationalist should possess. I basically created a persona that I would want to talk to. I think that subconsciously I felt that if I wanted to talk to this person, every other girl would. The persona represents some of my ideal self as well- the assertive person who takes initiative. And then, since I was hidden in the anonymity of the Internet and even buried deeper in this fake persona, inhibitions definitely dropped, and I felt some true self came through, since I didn't have to worry too much about impressing the other person. In fact, I didn't want to impress her so much that she fell in love with this guy I was creating. That would be quite cruel, something none of my selves want.