Assumptions you didn't know you had.

Your public face.

Sometimes in looking through Facebook, it can seem that everyone's life is perfect, full of smiling children, exciting parties, exotic vacations, and clever status updates that inspire responses from many.  It's a way to link to new and interesting things you might find surfing the web, play a variety of electronic games, a way to promote new businesses, and it's even becoming a medium for true social change.

It's also a way to realize that some of the people you know are really really irritating.  But are they irritating only online, or does this illustrate a more general truth about who they are?

People have commonly assumed that people put forth their best public face on social networking sites, and that they present not a real version of themselves, but an idealized one.  A recent study conducted by Sam Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin, however, suggests that Facebook profiles result in fairly accurate representations of our personalities. Researchers asked participants to fill out questionnaires on the Big 5 personality measures of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, listing both what they perceived themselves to be (their real self) and what they wished to be (their ideal self).  It turns out that when observers then rated their perceptions of the participants' profiles, the ratings matched pretty closely.  In other words, people's profiles were a good representation of their personality.

 "I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," says Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles. "In fact, our findings suggest that online social networking profiles convey rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren't trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off."

Gosling argues that this "honesty" thus makes Facebook (and potentially other social networking sites) more like genuine social interaction, and that it fulfills many of the same functions.  He likens Facebook to using a telephone - allowing us to keep in contact with people with whom we might not keep in contact with otherwise. He makes the argument that his research shows that we really can trust the online personas people present to the world.

While I agree with these statements generally, I would also point out that online, particularly when posts can be made anonymous, many people are prone towards making statements that they would not make in real life.  The online framework provides a sense of anonymity which can sometimes result in online sharing of content that, if people reflected on it a bit, might not be information they want out there. There are consequences to this.  For example, in the recent past people have lost their jobs, cyberstalked their exes, inadvertently alerted their insurance companies to potential fraud, and even accidentally posted embarrassing photos of British spies in speedos.  While these are perhaps more extreme examples of the possible consequences of online over-sharing, it's rare to find a person that hasn't had some form of online gaffe.

In the past few weeks, I've gotten dozens of requests for letters of recommendation.  I'm willing happy to do so, and have, in the process, been advising students to make sure that any social networking sites are made private.  Recently, admissions committees have been using such materials to help make their decisions about which students to allow into programs.  And, Facebook does not seem to be helping students make that cut.

 A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. Of those colleges making use of the online information, 38% said that what they saw "negatively affected" their views of the applicant.

So, a word to the wise. Keep up with the new privacy features on Facebook, and when they are instituted, update your privacy settings.  In the meantimes, make your profile private, consider the use of lists to control the flow of outgoing information, and most importantly, don't ever put anything on Facebook that you would be horrified to find the world at large viewing.  Once it is on the web, it is there forever. 

Remember, your mom could be watching.

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