How accurately do we represent ourselves online?

Social networking is not just a way to keep in touch with people you already know; it's a way to get to know new people. Sometimes this meeting is entirely electronic and sometimes it might mean looking someone up on Facebook who you recently met in real life.

This has consequences as employers and educators look at Internet profiles to learn more about potential employees and students.

Many might argue that their Facebook profile does not accurately represent them and shouldn't be used by a potential employer to judge character or personality.

So how well do these profiles express who we are?

That's the question the research project called "You just get me" asks.

It is a social networking experiment that assesses how similar or different our opinions of our personalities are from strangers viewing a self-generated profile on the Internet.

This is an interesting question. In Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on the Facebook Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Hewitt and Forte found many students didn't think professors should be on Facebook:

One student noted that the Facebook “can unfairly skew a
professor's perception of a student in a student environment,”
which indicates that she perceives the Facebook as a place that is “owned” by students as a group.

Offhand, I might agree with her. The majority of photos of me on the website were posted by my peers; photos which are usually unflattering and demonstrate a far higher amount of inebriation than is representative of my time in college.

Youjustgetme.com doesn't test for the influence of a community photo album, but it does demonstrate that for the most part, our Internet profiles pretty accurately describe the way we view ourselves.

You must create a profile to view the results or you can view a summary in Joe McCarthy's blog, Gumption.

I may be misrepresenting myself or possess an inaccurate view of my personality, because my profile is receiving evaluations with consistently low accuracy. It would seem people think I am far more organized and conservative than I believe myself to be.

According to the study, it might be because I'm a guy. Women consistently scored higher both in ability to evaluate others' profiles accurately and creating profiles that are evaluated accurately.

Or maybe I just don't want to admit I'm a dirty hippie.

-Robot Crusoe