2.3.2 The Importance Of Online Self-Presentation
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The Importance of Online Self-Presentation
One of the most powerful vehicles for presenting your self online is your profile photo. Whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, or any other site, this image, more than any other, represents who you are to others. It is attached to pretty much everything you do: status updates, messages, wall posts, links, photo and video uploads, and so forth. Of course, you can store many profile photos, but at any given time you can only display one—making your profile photo the defining image representing your online self. When I first built my Facebook profile, the photo I chose was one taken at a club, right before my band went onstage. For me, it depicted the “melancholy artist” that I consider part of my self-concept. But presenting my self online in this fashion was a disaster. Within hours of posting it, I was flooded with messages from students, colleagues, and even long-lost friends: “Are you OK?” “Did someone die?” I quickly pulled the photo and replaced it with a more positive one—a sunny image of me and my boys taken atop a mountain near Sun Valley. Now I use the melancholy photo only rarely, as accompaniment to a sad or angry status update.
Presenting the Self Online Online communication provides us with unique benefits and challenges for self-presentation. When you talk with others face-to-face, people judge your public self not just on what you’re saying but also what you look like—your age, gender, clothing, facial expressions, and so forth. Each of these cues provides others with information about who you are, independent from anything you might say. Similarly, during a phone call, vocal cues such as tone, pitch, and volume help you and your conversation partner draw conclusions about each other. But during online interactions, the amount of information communicated—visual, verbal, and nonverbal—is radically restricted and more easily controlled. We carefully choose our photos and edit our text messages, e-mail, instant messages, and profile descriptions. We selectively self-present in ways that make us look good, without having to worry about verbal slipups, uncontrollable nervous habits, or physical disabilities that might make people judge us (Parks, 2007).
People routinely present themselves online (through photos and written descriptions) in ways that amplify positive personality characteristics such as warmth, friendliness, and extraversion (Vazire & Gosling, 2004). For instance, photos posted on social networking sites typically show groups of friends, fostering the impression that the person in the profile is likable, fun, and popular (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). These positive and highly selective depictions of self generally work as intended. Viewers of online profiles tend to form impressions of a profile’s subject that match the subject’s intended self-presentation (Gosling, Gaddis, & Vazire, 2007). So, for example, if you post profile photos and descriptions in an attempt to portray your self as “wild” and “hard partying,” this is the self that others will likely perceive.
The freedom that online communication allows us in flexibly crafting our selves comes with an associated cost: unless you have met someone in person, you will have difficulty determining whether their online self is authentic or a mask. Through misleading profile descriptions, fake photos, and phony screen names, people communicating online can assume identities that would be impossible for them to maintain in offline encounters (Rintel & Pittam, 1997). On online dating sites, for example, people routinely distort their self-presentations in ways designed to make them more attractive (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). Some people may also “gender swap” online, portraying themselves as female when they’re male, or vice versa—often by posting fake photos (Turkle, 1995). For this reason, scholars suggest that you should never presume the gender of someone you interact with online if you haven’t met the person face-to-face, even if he or she has provided photos (Savicki, Kelley, & Oesterreich, 1999).
Question
Evaluating the Self Online Because of the pervasiveness of online masks, people often question the truthfulness of online self-presentations, especially overly positive or flattering ones. Warranting theory (Walther & Parks, 2002) suggests that when assessing someone’s online self-descriptions, we consider the warranting value of the information presented—that is, the degree to which the information is supported by other people and outside evidence (Walther, Van Der Heide, Hamel, & Schulman, 2008). Information that was obviously crafted by the person, that isn’t supported by others, and that can’t be verified offline has low warranting value, and most people wouldn’t trust it. Information that’s created or supported by others and that can be readily verified through alternative sources on- and offline has high warranting value, and consequently is perceived as valid. So, for example, news about a professional accomplishment that you post on your Facebook page will have low warranting value. But if the same information is also featured on your employer’s Web site, its warranting value will increase (Walther et al., 2008). Profile photos and albums are also assessed in terms of warranting value. Photos you take and post of yourself will have less warranting value than similar photos of you taken and posted by others, especially if the photos are perceived as having been taken without your knowledge, such as “candid” shots (Walther et al., 2008).
Not surprisingly, the warranting value of online self-descriptions plummets when they are directly contradicted by others. Imagine that Jane, a student in your communication class, friends you on Facebook. Though you don’t know her especially well, you accept and, later, check out her page. In the content that Jane has provided, she presents herself as quiet, thoughtful, and reserved. But messages from her friends on her Facebook wall contradict this, saying things like: “You were a MANIAC last night!” and “U R A wild child!” Based on this information, you’ll likely disregard Jane’s online self-presentation and judge her instead as sociable and outgoing, perhaps even “crazy” and “wild.”
Research shows that when friends, family members, coworkers, or romantic partners post information on your page, their messages shape others’ perceptions of you more powerfully than your own postings do—especially when their postings contradict your self-description (Walther et al., 2008). This holds true not just for personality characteristics such as extraversion (how “outgoing” you are), but also physical attractiveness. One study of Facebook profiles found that when friends posted things like “If only I was as hot as you” or (alternatively) “Don’t pay any attention to those jerks at the bar last night; beauty is on the inside,” such comments influenced others’ perceptions of the person’s attractiveness more than the person’s own description of his or her physical appeal (Walther et al., 2008).