I recently
ran across a short personality quiz through an ad on Facebook for a website called
Playbuzz. I clicked on the link and was
led to a webpage that started with “Can we guess who you are in 20 questions?” I let curiosity get the best of me and
absentmindedly answered the prompted questions.
I was asked how much time it took for me to get ready in the morning, if
I liked eating corn on the cob, and the last time I had been intoxicated, among
other odd things. My results? I am a
woman in my early 30’s with two kids, have a job I'm only complacent with, and am married to a
great husband, none of which are even close to my current reality. This is the picture that’s supposed to look
like me as well. It’s a little off.
If you would
like to take the quiz for yourself you can access it here.
This site had no credibility or
scientific research behind it, and it was listed with other quizzes for bored
souls such as myself with names like “which magical creature are you?” or “what
age will you die”. Any logical person
should not put any faith into the quiz results.
However, the pointless questions reminded me of how untrue a person’s
online identity can be.
I signed up for Facebook only
three or four weeks ago, and was prompted with questions similar to those on
the quiz. They weren’t quite so random,
but they still had little blurbs of information I rarely thought about. I didn’t answer any of them, as I was not
about to spend 15 minutes picking my favorite movies, books, and TV shows. Also, if I had answered the questions, would
it really lead people to know what I’m truly like? Could a person somehow figure out I am a
naturally curious person who likes to take stuff in rather than be the center
of attention, or that I am content with only a few close friends, or that I
have a desire to be anywhere but the Midwest someday to see what else is out
there? Sure, they might know small
details from stuff I like or post, but this compilation of social network
activity does not do my personality any justice, even if someone spent an hour
looking through everything on my account.
Looking through some friends’ Facebooks, I’m guessing they would say the
same.
For anyone who doesn’t want the world
to know their personal lives, this is great. That person’s Facebook identity
can be tweaked to a more socially acceptable version. However, what if said person wanted to craft
an online identity (whether it be on Facebook or not) that perfectly
encompassed all the traits that made him who he is. Could he do it?
I’m going to leave that question
alone for a moment. In the Rainie and
Wellman book entitled Networked-The New Social Operating System, networked individualism was explained through the Johnson-Lenz
couple. Long story short, after the wife’s
freak accident that sent her to the hospital, the couple received an outpouring
of support achieved through their social network. Close friends and complete strangers “sent
poems, expressions of love and encouragement, and offers of help and prayer” as
well as financial help and professional advice.
The couple
quickly realized the work they needed to put into this social network system in
order to maintain the support. Through
every means of communication, they coordinated with people wanting to
help. They were immensely successful,
yet did people actually know who they were helping? The couple even asked themselves “What’s the
right balance of optimism, humor, and candidness?” They knew they had to create an online persona
that people sympathized with in order to keep receiving kindness. They said they opted out of real-time
conversations and interactions where trust grows, but yet agreed that “each
relationship is a source of unique nourishment”. They used the word relationship like they
knew everyone who was helping them. They
didn’t. People liked them because they
lived in Portland, or had a shared interest in Jazz music, not because they
would be close friends in real life.
The book
went on to say people live in networks where the person is now the focus, and
people are hooked on each other. If this
is true, shouldn’t the idea or image of that person be absolutely true? I think it is the farthest thing from
it. Besides the people that already had
close ties with the Johnson-Lenz couple, no one knew them. The couple designed who they were online to
get the most out of their network. It
wasn’t a network of personal relationships.
It was a network of business type relationships where one person helped
another person. I could have helped the
couple by giving them $50 to make me feel like I’m making a charitable contribution
to the well-being of their lives without giving them a second thought of sympathy
the next day.
With that
backstory in mind, I will return to my initial question. Could someone perfectly depict his
personality online? I do not believe
so. There are far too many facets of a
personality to contain in an identity of statuses, pictures, blog posts, and
liked pages. In order for the
Johnson-Lenz couple to receive support, they had to filter their lives to
choose which parts to expound upon. I
highly doubt the wife was going to put anything on her social media about how
maybe she enjoys shopping. (I have no
idea what the wife liked, this is just an example). The couple’s audience didn’t care about her
shopping. They wanted to know about her
health, or they wanted to see what a great couple this is to make them feel
good about sending assistance in some way.
The couple used rhetoric to choose which components of their lives would
appeal to their audience. They had no
intention of showing the world who they were inside and out. For my person in question trying to make his
own identity online, he could try and compose a good idea of himself, but even
then he is left at the mercy of his audience.
For example, maybe he posts a link to a republican article he really
liked in order to further his association with conservative values, but a
Facebook friend sees it and assumes he posted it because he has a tendency to
hop on the bandwagon and only posted it because ten of his other friends did. Similar to a rhetorical situation, a person
can make very educated guesses as to what the audience will interpret. However, nothing is certain, and therefore
the person’s Facebook page (or blog or twitter) does not certainly show his correct
personality. Also keep in mind that even
if an audience rightly understands one trait of a person, there are bound to be
fifty more that they might be wrong about.
I don’t know any exact numbers, but statistically this doesn’t look
good.
Overall, the
man I’ve talked about (the one trying to create his persona via technology) could
steer people in the right direction about who he really is. I’m not saying everyone is strangers
online. However, in the end, nothing
will beat the face-to-face relationships that people have valued for thousands
of years. The Rainie and Wellman book
claimed that the small social networks people used to have with a few important
family members, friends, and neighbors are being replaced with loser,
fragmented networks that are far more beneficial to society. I agree that these large social networks such
as Facebook and Twitter have exponentially increased in presence, but those
small social networks away from any electronic screen are never going to go
away. Humans by nature need the
closeness and support provided by knowing someone inside and out and not
through a profile page.
Sources:
Playbuzz website
Rainie and Wellman's Networked-The New Social Operating System
Hey Alex,
ReplyDeleteI found your blog very interesting for starters, but I just want to play devil’s advocate on your topic. The thing I found to be the main topic or question from your post is that you don’t think someone can express their true self via social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc.). I honestly think people do show their true selves all over the different social medias. The only thing is that you are more concerned with people filtering their ideas, thoughts, and opinions to be pleasing to other on social media. I think if we took a look at more how they are saying things rather than what is being said is how you see who people really are.
In an article, I recently read, titled Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language by Park, G. H. et al. it looked at exactly how things are said and not so much what is said. They listed four reasons that social media analysis can be beneficial and reliable:
1.) “social media language is written in natural social settings, and captures communication among friends and acquaintances.”
2.) “expensive prospective studies are less necessary, because the data can be retroactively accessed for research purposes.”
3.) “social media users disclose information about themselves at unusually high rates; for many users, a frequent topic of discussion is themselves (Naaman, Boase, & Lai, 2010).”
4.) “social media users typically present their true selves and not just idealized versions (Back et al., 2010).”
The analysis of posts begins with vocabulary. So yes specific words that can be altered for tone and audience purposes but you have to look at the psychology behind the words as well. This method is called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, & Booth, 2007). The purpose of this is to “automatically count word frequencies for over 60 psychologically relevant categories.” The examples they use are “function words” (e.g., articles, pronouns, conjunctions), “affective processes” (e.g., happy, cried, nervous), and “social processes” (e.g., mate, friend, talk). So therefore, saying if you broke up a specific person’s text posts over time broke them down by word categories and counted them you could pick out personality traits. And because the word categories are derived by pre-existing definitions this is call “closed vocabulary.”
Then you have open vocabulary. According to the article “open-vocabulary methods do not rely on a priori word or category judgments; rather, they extract a comprehensive collection of language features from the text being analyzed.” So, for open vocabulary they analyze:
• single, uncategorized words
• non-word symbols (e.g., emoticons, punctuation)
• multiword phrases
• clusters of semantically related words identified through unsupervised methods, or topics
This article goes into extensive detail of how they conducted their own research through this psychological lens which I found extremely interesting just because I had never really thought about it up until I read this. I think just like how we are taught in class that not necessarily does what we are saying matter as much as how good we are at saying things in specific ways to persuade in one direction or another. I their conclusion they state that “using these techniques to study the words and phrases through which people express themselves, as well as their change over time, may provide us with a clearer portrait of their unfolding mental life.” This I think is important because you might not always be interpreting the actual message behind what people are saying. Yes, I think face-to-face interactions are always going to hold a higher position of importance, but I feel social media can still say a lot about people personality wise as well.
If you look it up by the title (Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language by Park, G. H. et al. ) it should show up through our library source search engine.
It wouldn't let me put the link on here but I did also download it if anyone is interested!!!