Facebook vs. Chatroulette

Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

A new study out in Psychological Science finds that Facebook is not the place to go if you want to create an online alter ego. Users there don’t tend to present themselves as much better (or worse) than they are in real life, in part because you have to use your legal name when signing up.

This up-front requirement that you “be yourself” on Facebook has had a trickle-down effect on how people use the network. Active users typically only connect with friends, family and other real-world acquaintances as opposed to strangers and other pseudo-friends as was done back in the MySpace days of “he whoever collects the most friends wins.”

For anonymous fun, there’s now the freakshow known as chatroulette, where bared penises sometimes seem to outnumber faces. Facebook, on the other hand, is much more an extension of your public, fully accountable identity where employers, real life friends, and even your parents call you out if you haven’t included a picture of your wife and kids in your profile pictures.

The battle between anonymity and connectivity is not entirely clear cut, of course. Chatroulette conversations can lead to sustained contacts just as Facebook realness can lead to random encounters. But generally speaking, FB is far less a vacation from reality than the briefly amusing slide show of strangers on CR.