Assignment 2: Brett Favre on MySpace?!
Link to ArticleOption #1:
MySpace is one of the most popular web sites currently available, with over 100 million registered users, and many more regular visitors. The majority of these people use this site for its intended purpose, listing their personal information, and networking with their friends. This article, however, describes the many people who are putting up deceptive profiles – not simply lying or exaggerating their own information, but actually pretending to be someone else. In this case, the author is talking about people who are impersonating celebrities, in this case the football player Brett Favre.
This is definitely deception according to Carlson et al’s definition – “a message knowingly transmitted by a sender to foster a false belief or conclusion by the reader.” (pg. 6) These false profiles are created by an individual, usually with the intent of trying to pass it off as the celebrities’ personal MySpace site. In fact many people have been successfully fooled by this profile, posting messages they believed they would actually be seen by Brett Favre.
This mode of digital deception is really easy to accomplish and pull off successfully. Someone who pretends to be Brett Favre is probably just creating the profile for fun, but also does not want to get caught breaking the rules of the site. This slight chance of getting in trouble creates a moderate level of motivation, which Carlson et al believe would increase deception success (pg. 16). Carlson et al also believe that deception is more successful via a text-based medium which allows you to edit and rehearse your thoughts (pg. 18) – “Brett Favre’s” creator was allowed as much time as desired to write this profile, and they are allowed to edit his profile at any time, to make it appear more accurate.
Carlson et al’s fifth prediction seems to best illustrate why these fake profiles are so successful. This prediction states that if the deceiver’s experiences help with the requirements of the deception, that they will be more successful at deception (pg. 18). Someone creating Brett Favre’s profile only needs to have basic information about how to create a MySpace profile and using computers, which is a skill that many people, especially teens, know and can pick up easily. The creator also has to have “experience” in the form of knowledge of the celebrity – if a person knows or simply looks up the readily available information about many celebrities, they could easily put it together to create a plausible looking profile.
posted by Kate Fenner @ 8:35 PM
2 Comments:
I certainly agree with Robin that your post is very well laid out - you explain what deception is, how it applies to fake celebrity profiles, and how experience with the medium can make it so easy to deceive an unsuspecting public. However, I wonder just how unsuspecting the public really is. Certainly there are celebrities that do have MySpace profiles, a number of musicians immediately jump to mind, however I think this is the exception and not the norm. Celebrities are constantly trying to control their “brand image,” revealing only certain parts of their lifestyles to the public. This is part of what makes tabloids so popular – that the public can see beyond the marketed image to the “real” (or at least as real as the tabloid cares to make it) life or the celebrity. With this in mind, it is unlikely that a celebrity would create a profile in a place as public as MySpace where users can leave comments which could be damaging to the celebrity’s image.
For the most part I believe that the public realizes this, and takes will take celebrity profiles with a grain of salt. This leads into the idea of the “truth bias” – does it still apply? When you see someone dressed as a celebrity in a public place, do you immediately assume it’s the celebrity and rush over for an autograph or do you step back and take a look to make sure that s/he is not an imposter? The same applies online.
Again, great job. Your post certainly raised some interesting ideas.
I think your post was very fun to read about, especially considering how common it is for people to friend this clearly fake people. Truthfully, I have been on both sides of the fence: I’ve “friended” and pretended to be another person through a separate account (on facebook). Interestingly enough, many people are being caught and booted, and I’ve seen a bunch of fake accounts to disappear, including my own (I was Cornell’s iteration of Zinedine Zidane).
So I agree: this is definitely deception according to Carlson et al. Nice work relating both predicted motivation and medium effects. I agree that the fifth proposition is the most likely one to be helpful in this scenario. I also think it’s funny how this example contradicts other parts of the paper. P4, which says that, “the more experience deceivers have with the message, medium or context relative to the receiver, the greater the likelihood of deception success and the lower the likelihood of receiver detection accuracy,” is totally inaccurate in this case. You’d think that this potentially could be as important as P5 in this case, but as it turns out, it isn’t. However, the article also raises and interesting point about kids being potentially harmed by this, since they don’t have enough experience with the medium or website. This, of course, shows that P5 is somewhat relevant, just not towards the high-experience factor. This article clearly shows that receivers of deception have been misjudged. But truthfully, it’s not that the receivers are “great detectors:” it’s just that the context makes it hard for them no to be.
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