Do we reveal who we really are on social media sites?
A new study of social media use in Germany reveals that people who use social networking tools like Facebook actually do present fairly accurate representations of themselves online. The researcher, Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, argues that social interaction on these sites is a good indicator of a user’s real personality.
“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people’s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways.”
One of the classic pieces of writing about identity online is Judith Donath’s paper on Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Donath looks at Usenet communities, which really were deprived of visual images of their members. One of Donath’s arguments is that the design of a community affects how its members build their identities.
“Whether or not you know that other people are present or privy to a conversation, whether you can connect an on-line identity to a real-world person, whether you have only a faint notion of the personalities of those around you or a vibrant and detailed impression – this is all determined by the design of the environment.”
Social tools that allow users to post, tag, and be tagged by other people in photos, videos, and messages differ greatly from email lists in which the tone of a member’s writing defines who he or she is. Our online identities are shaped not just by how long we belong to a community, what we post about ourselves, and how we interact with other people in the community, but also by what other people post about us. We learn to trust each other online based on how we develop those identities. That trust and those identities develop based on the very structure and design of the sites we visit.
I haven’t seen the new German research, but I suspect this is a rather simplistic way of looking at interactions on social networks. Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, seems to reinforce my assumption:
“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is.”
If you follow me long enough, you kind of get the idea that I’m very controlling about the environment around me, whether I’m riding the metro into work or at home fretting about whether a lamp is placed in the center of a table. But I’m very careful to hide the Julie that can’t leave the house each morning without making sure that all the counter tops are perfectly clean or that has serious anxiety issues with how long it takes the metro to get to my office each day. I suspect everyone functions this way. Including – ahem – finding the best possible pictures to use as our avatars.
And, of course, it’s not an understatement to write that it’s a lot easier to build an identity online when we act like real people — when the lines between personal and company brand blur a little and when we learn to act like real people using the technology.
