I am a member of many common virtual communities, and many of them are of the common variety for instance MySpace, Facebook, and I also utilize blogs for this class. It is virtually located on a shared network online that links all its users.
My Facebook account establishes my online identity in a variety of carefully controlled ways. It will be fun to see how my project turns out because this is partly what we chose to investigate. My profile begins with a picture. Pictures I think are the easiest way to pique someone’s interest into scrolling down your page. People choose a variety of pictures. Some people pick their senior picture because it’s perfectly airbrushed, some people choose the bathroom picture they took themselves, and some choose a picture of them doing something “cool”. Either way each picture tells a story about how that person wants you to see them and how they feel about themselves.
If you were to ask me what my picture says about me, I would say my current picture is me saying that I clean up nice. Usually when people see me on campus I’m not really trying too hard because like every other college student we are short on time and energy. In the past I’ve had the “Party girl pictures”, and I’ve also had the “look at me pictures”. Each was sending a very specific message that people definitely picked up on.
After my picture gained their interest they scroll down and they read my basic statistics, which include birthday, hometown, marital status, and intended degrees. Sometimes I omit my marital status altogether, but usually it states fabulously single and that can communicates to people a dual message. It can say she’s on the prowl or it can say she’s not the type to be caught up the dating scene.
I think the most important way my Facebook establishes my online reputation is through the networks you are connected in, and also the comment section of my profile. If I were to not know a person and wanted to know who they were and what their interests were, I would immediately look at the comments their friends made about them. From a person’s comments you can tell what type of sense of humor they have, if they are central to their network, and most importantly who are they dating.
If I Facebook someone I comments that send up a red flag in my head are comments that involve a female or multiple females leaving what I like to call pillow talk comments. These are the comments that clue me in to who this person has a relationship with whether or not it’s been made official or not. If someone has multiple pillow talks going on with multiple people from that I know that this is not someone I would want to be associated with. My comments reflect that honestly, so that is why I apply it to others.
It is incredibly easy to create steal someone’s online identity using information already provided by them. I have friends that have created fake profiles for the purpose of surveillance using someone else’s pictures and profile information with everyone’s favorite shortcut ctrl+c. Also with the information being provided such as screen name people could be “phished”. I had a friend who would use that information than send people falsified AOL instant messages saying that someone else is logged on in a different location and to log them off they just needed to type in their password. It was never for malicious intent, but it was wrong nonetheless.
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