Sunday, October 24, 2010

Facebook espionage

The girl that studies abroad
One of my friends is currently in Madrid, Spain and so I thought it might be interesting to see how she uses facebook to stay in touch with her friends in the US. Due to the fact that she is so far away, she always keeps posting stuff. She posts almost every day. And also people respond to it. There are quite many entries on her wall and so I conclude that she is very popular in her circle of friends. She has 1.553 friends, so there are many people she could talk to but the number of people she does is probably way less! Most of her friends are probably people she has gone to High School with or people from classes in college, which is nothing unusual.
Her profile pic looks very much like she is a party person. It's her and a friend of her in it and they are both sort of dressed for going out. They smiles and
look like they were having a good time.
As far as I know her her profile is very accurate. She is a crazy person and her profile and especially the pics she posted show that she really is crazy and down for a good time. So she doesn't perform some different identity.

The second person I looked at posts way less freuquently. She is already in the work-force and is preparing for a big exam. This also becomes clear on her page, because of her posts. She mentiones, for example, that she doesn't want to study any more and things like that. So she posts about 3 times a week. Her friends are majorly friends from school and from work. That is, there also are many "friends" she probably does not care about, but not even close to as many as the other girl has. Her profile pic was taken in Egypt and shows only her. She is very tanned and smiles in front of a river-like pool. I have known her for a long time now and I can say that she does not perform anything and things she has on her profile reflect the way she is.

The last person I looked at was my calculus teacher from ACC. She is 50+, married and has 5 kids. Like probably most older people, she doesn't post very frequently. Her last post was on Oct. 13th and there she only uploaded some pictures from a trip to Vegas. Not a crazy trip though since it was for a wedding. She only has 109 friends, which indicates that she probably selects, who she wants to have as a friend. In her profile pic it is her and an old gentleman, who probably is her dad. Both are dressed up, because it's a picture from the wedding. For her it is the hardest to tell, whether her profile is accurate or not, because she doesn't use it too much and I don't know her well enough. But if I had to make an educated guess, I would say that most things are pretty accurate, since I know her as a pretty straight forward person.

1 comment:

  1. It's interesting that you are thinking about in terms whether profiles are accurate or not. Do you think it is possible for someone to have a profile that is more accurate than their meatspace self?
    I'm sort of kidding but it's one way to think about it.

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