Session 6: Online Identity

Question 1. How do we know online identity when we see it? Propose a working definition of online identity for a site that you’re studying and compare it with one or two definitions from those in the reading selections.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines “identity” as the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. This encompasses the main idea that I would use when describing the term, identity. The working definition of online identity that I would use simply builds upon Merriam-Webster’s definition: online identity is the online distinguishing character or personality of an individual. One interesting idea unique to online identity is that it does not exist until the individual writes himself or herself into being. Philosophers may debate whether or not we do this with our offline identity, however, the consciousness with which we create our online identity may add different aspects of self-assessment, deliberation and self-creation that I believe is distinctive to our online personality.

Have you heard the old saying that in five years you will be what you eat and who your friends are? Since we probably can’t assess online identity from the user’s diet, we could obtain clues about the person’s identity by looking at the social interactions that occur. According to Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009), online identity could be determined from the user’s attention to and interactions with other people on the network. Who their friends are, in other words. Althought the structures of social networks provide a visualization of declared “friends”, this in itself does not give a clear picture of the closeness of the relationship or the significance among people. A more accurate analysis might be the study of the interaction patterns among friends. This interaction pattern could provide the researcher with clues about a user's identity.

Attention is a scarce commodity as the expectations of daily life and work commitments cause most people to have limited time to engage with others on the internet. In situations where the commodity of time is limited, people tend to default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. Huberman, Romero and Wu determined that on a social network site, Twitter, individuals may declare a large group of friends but individualized attention occurred only within a subset of the friends and followers. One aspect of online identity could be assessed by evaluating how and how often the user interacts with other people on the network.

Liu (2007) brings up the idea that an individual’s identity can be gleaned from the person’s interests, which are typically posted on the online profile. What the person lists as interests – music, books, sports, movies, etc, can function to detect an aspect of their personality and identity. Since I think what we enjoy is a crucial part of our identity, I would add the information that the user chooses to list in the profile section is important to the working definition of online identity.


Question 2. Write two informal use scenarios based on your observations of existing users. Use scenarios are outlines of common interactions: how an individual with a predictable need enters your system, navigates through common decision points and options step by step, then (ideally) exits with what he or she came for. Include functional interactions (just user decision points relevant to the user's goal, you need not exhaustively list all options) and interpersonal interactions.

For this assignment, I will explore online identity for the social network site I am most familiar with at this point, Facebook. On the Facebook, site, users are real people, presenting themselves much as they would offline. Although it’s possible that the user may post fictional personas, made-up for some reason or the other, Facebook users don’t use easily recognizable pseudonyms as this would not be recognizable to other people already familiar with that person. On Facebook, the person’s online identity appears, on the surface, to be a relatively straightforward extension of their offline personality

On Facebook, there are many cues and signals that yield information about an individual's identity. Some, such as the photo and the self-description featured in the profile, can be readily perceived and easily evaluated. Some indications of the person’s identity, such as conventional signals (such as their interests) may be easily faked. Others, such as the network and communication patterns of the individual, provide a reliable and, if someone knows how to do it, a traceable evidence of the person’s interactions with others on the online network.

Informal Use Scenario #1
Tim, an acquaintance from high school, found my profile on Facebook within the first few days that I posted it. Tim sent me a friends request, along with a message indicating that as he started his Facebook account, my profile popped up on his home page because we graduated from the same high school in the same year. I accepted the friend request from Tim.

Figure 1: Denise and Tim Become Friends

As we began our online communication, Tim wrote daily on my wall, disclosing information about his job, telling me about changes in the area where we grew up, commenting on information that I provided to him and engaging in other general light social conversation. I asked Tim why he joined Facebook:

Figure 2: Denise writes on Tim’s Wall

Tim replied that he joined Facebook to make new friends and to reestablish older friendships - subtext – I think Tim’s real motivation is that he wanted to find a romantic relationship using Facebook. This need is only my assumption based upon Tim’s decision point to exit the communication loop after I posted family pictures:

Figure 3: My family Pictures Posted in January

After this date, Tim does not reply to any other messages from me but when I looked up information on his home page for this assignment, I noticed that he responds consistently on his wall to other females who listed their relationship status as single.


Informal Use Scenario #2:
Rebecca and I have been friends for about two years. We met at work and realized that we have many of the same interests. In addition to our other interests, Rebecca enjoys social networking for socialization opportunities and she uses this as her preferred recreation and leisure time activity. During an in person meeting in March, Rebecca let me know she is a member of Facebook as well as other online communities. We agreed to become friends on Facebook and she sent me a friend request a day or two later. In the month that Rebecca and I have been friends on Facebook, Rebecca has changed her profile picture at least twice weekly (here is the newest one). She has updated her profile every week and she provides comments on her wall at least once each day. These updates are broadcasted to each of her 203 friends every time she posts them. For example, the comment posted yesterday at 2:15 am was, “Rebecca has made reasonable progress on the lesson plan and is now going to bed”. Under each of these postings, there are from 2 – 5 comments back to her from friends, which are also broadcast to all of Rebecca’s friends. In addition, recent activity is updated daily as well, including information like that listed below which is incomprehensible to me:

Figure 5: Rebecca's Activities

Question 3. Using the scenarios, address this question: how are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community?

In the two scenarios described above, both Tim and Rebecca effectively use the scarce resource of attention in their online interactions, but they do it in very different ways. Since both Tim and Rebecca have other obligations, like working, they have limited time to engage in social network activities on Facebook. They each use different strategies to maximize the attention they pay to their Facebook friends. Tim focuses his attention on interacting individually with women who may potentially meet his goal of entering into a meaningful relationship (this is, of course my assumption of his goal from his online behavior). Rebecca maximizes her attention to her entire network of friends by posting messages on her wall at least once per day. As these are updated to each friend’s wall, everyone receives a daily update of Rebecca as well as postings from other people who comment about her post.

Social network research classifies ties as strong or weak, heterogeneous or homogeneous. In the scenarios described above, Rebecca’s daily comment strategy uses frequency of posting information to a large group of people to create stronger ties. Tim uses the strategy of selectively limiting his number of interactions to only those people who may meet his need for a meaningful relationship in order to create stronger ties with these individuals. Strong ties that both Rebecca and Tim are trying to establish and maintain are, or could become, close confidants, people relied upon in an emergency and with whom one is likely to share multiple interests. A close-knit network of strong ties can supply extensive support. Being a member of such a group requires a large commitment of time and attention. Both Rebecca and Time engage in frequent contact among the members of their respective group.

Compared to the small group of individuals that Tim corresponds with, Rebecca’s ties may be relatively weak. She corresponds daily with a large group of people, many of whom may be distant acquaintances, people known in a specific context and towards whom she feels less responsibility. Most of her friends do not know each other, for example, out of her 203 friends, she and I have only two (2) mutual friends. In this case, it is a sparsely connected network of weak but heterogeneous ties. As Donath (2007) reported, this provides access to a great variety of ideas and experiences. In Rebecca’s case, the use of her Facebook social network system makes establishing and sustaining large numbers of such ties very efficient.

How else can we analyze online identities? According to Donath (2007), one way is to analyze the interactions on a social network site through the use of signaling theory. Signaling theory assesses the way individuals signal interactions with each other and it analyzes why some signals are reliable and others are not. Signaling theory is based on the idea that everyday interactions are rife with divergent goals and small (or large) deceptions. People want to make the best possible impression, to appear important, creative, and popular, while others want to know if they really possess those qualities. When the costs of being deceived are low, people may not care if something is an exaggeration. However, when the costs are high, they may demand a more reliable signal.

One class of signals, termed assessment signals, is inherently reliable, because producing the signal requires possessing the indicated quality. Donath gives the illustration that lifting a 500-pound weight is a reliable signal of strength; a weaker person simply cannot do it. On Facebook the first assessment signal that is available is the user’s picture. Providing a photo is optional, so the participant can choose to use the default graphic or add their own photo. The photograph can provide a strong assessment signal. Does this person’s picture appear to match the information presented in their profile? Are they old, fat, young, pretty? Does the picture match the person I’m already familiar with? Do I want to connect with this person? The picture provides me with a strong assessment signal to determine whether or not I already know, or want to know this person. Regarding the identities for Rebecca and Tim, shortly after Tim and I became friends in January, he posted a picture which has remained the same over these past few months. It looked like someone of the age I would expect and I thought it could resemble the kid I knew in high school. Rebecca’s picture changes at least weekly. At times she uses her own image and at other times she uses a scene or, like the current image, a cartoon. Facebook friends can use the photos provided to assess the reliability of the identity of the person or to make assumptions about the person’s online identity based on how strong the photo acts as an assessment signal.

Are there any "Strategic" or "handicap" signals on Facebook? Strategic or handicap signals are assessment signals that suggest that a great deal of some scarce resource is available to the individual because they can afford to waste that resource. The idea is that only someone who has an excess of a given resource can afford to expend it for communicative display. Zahavi (in Donath, 2007) emphasized that these costly signals are only reliable in the domain of the cost. The owner of an expensive car may use it to signal both wealth and attractiveness, but its high price only guarantees that the owner is wealthy; it is an unreliable indicator of attractiveness. In the cases of Rebecca and Tim, both use attention to their friends as a strategic signal. By providing attention through personal messages, they indicate that they are willing to spend their resource (time) to establish or maintain a relationship with an individual. Rebecca uses the comment strategy to communicate with her entire network, broadening her impact to her entire network, while Tim communicates individually with a small number of friends.

In general, conventional signals, or self descriptions, are relatively reliable on Facebook. The user has the discretion to disclose as much or as little information as they choose. Conventional signals are kept honest on Facebook because the user needs some sort of accurate identifying information to engage other people known to them in the online social relationship. To ensure that people link only with those they truly know, one design approach is to increase the amount of knowledge about the other that potential linkers need to provide. Both Rebecca and Tim provided descriptors of themselves that seemed to me, on the surface, to match what I know about their offline personalities.

In summary, on Facebook, online identities are shaped through assessment signals such as photographs, conventional signals such as profile information and disclosing interests and patterns of interactions with friends, including method of contact and frequency of contact.

REFERENCE

Donath, Judith. (2007). Signals in Social Supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donath.html

Huberman, Bernardo, Daniel Romero and Fang Wu (2009). Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope" First Monday 14(1).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063

Liu, H. (2007). Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/liu.html