Social Media Perceptions

Initially, our group was interested in the concept of how our perceptions of other people have changed with the influence of social media. If you think about it, nowadays we have the ability to know someone, or at least get a good gauge on who they are, strictly by looking at them on social media--or can we? Our group came to the conclusion that each of us has been guilty a time or two in our life by judging a book by its cover prior to getting into the true density of the novel. In other words, we made assumptions about people before getting to know them based on their social media activity. Additionally, we all came to the conlcusion that with at least a good number of people, we assumed that we could indeed intepret people's social media in order to make an accurate assumption of who that person is in several different areas. Consequently, we wanted to see how correct, or incorrect, we all were in regards to the honest perception we get of people through social media. Our project consisted of 4 of the 6 of us each getting a non-mutual friend, and using two of our other members as test subjects. Each of our four friends would view one of our subjects via social media prior to meeting him in person for a 15-30 minute talk, and for the other they would stay completely ignorant to who he was and his social media and go into the meeting completely blind. Our hopes were that by completing a survey prior to meeting the first subject but after viewing his social media profile, and then meeting him and the other subject individually in-person, and then conducting a survey after meeting both comparing their thoughts on each in terms of knowing one through social media and not knowing the other at all, we would find some interesting insight into the differences in the encounters. What we found, after all four of our non-mutual friends going through the process, was that most assumed they would have more to talk about with the first subject whom they might through social media first. Neverthless, each one of them said that the conversation with the second subject, the blind meeting, was much more natural and effortless. They cited the reasons for the forced conversation with the first subject as most often being a consequence of second-guessing themselves, unsure of whether to discuss things they saw in his social media profile that they had in common or whether to just keep the conversation going naturally. In conclusion, we found that with the addition of social media, often times people may not be fully present in the conversation at hand because their opinions are not solely based off the in-person encounter, but rather they are constantly comparing how they perceived them through social media to their initial impressions of them in-person.