(Photo: “Digital Mask” by Fabrizio Laurenti)

It’s not news that people can adopt online personas that differ from their offline selves, both in appearance and behavior. But on Facebook or other platforms where there is no username or avatar to hide your identity this seems to be less common.

So now, using judgment based on personal moral and social values starts to come in to play. Sometimes the level of honesty on Facebook is a bit brutal for my taste, but at least it’s honest. But is it enough to qualify as a cry for help? Is there a correlation between inappropriate or high-risk behavior on social networking sites and the same pattern of behavior offline? And does it truly depend on the anonymity factor?

I was recently in a bar in northern Michigan, sitting next to a woman named Debbie. At the beginning of the evening, she told me a story about being embarrassed that someone had tagged her in a rather compromising photo, posing with a pool cue, on Facebook. I said that it was simple enough to remove the tag, although she didn’t seem to believe me – “I tried it,” she said, “you can’t do it!” It didn’t matter that I told her that I basically do Facebook for a living.

As the night wore on and she was on her tenth or eleventh glass of straight tequila, it seemed that this “pool cue” photo was actually more a point of pride than an embarrassment. She brought it up constantly; “I’m on Facebook with a pool cue between my legs!” she told every stranger she happened to stumble into.

“I’m low down nasty on MySpace, but on Facebook I’m legit,” she told me. Apparently – I must have missed this part – she told my boyfriend that her MySpace user name is Dirty Debbie Deepthroat (I already tried to find her and failed, so don’t go rushing to Google, especially if you’re at work right now).

Did I mention that this woman was in her late forties? And married with a grown son? I initially found her description of her online behavior foolish. I couldn’t believe that a grown woman would be okay advertising herself as Dirty anything. But her offline behavior was no different. At one point I had to point out to her that she was, ahem, falling out of her shirt – I think it was the one with the Led Zeppelin tattoo – as I watched her remove her stockings at the bar.

I searched around for research on whether a predilection toward high-risk behaviors (binge drinking, drug use, unsafe sex, etc.) offline correlated to similar behaviors online (posting drunk pictures, advertising sexuality – the kind of things that might get one fired if seen by the wrong person). I was unable to find any research about adults. However, I do know from my time working with nonprofits, that a study was published within the last year that confirmed that teenagers who engage in high-risk behaviors offline tend to be more likely to do risky things online, while young people who tend to take the straight and narrow in real life usually do the same when given access to the Internet.

In an interesting twist, some of the teens who use social media to portray themselves as engaging in high-risk activities in their real lives may actually just be posturing, according to a study published in the January 2009 issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. Which makes sense, considering that teen culture often applauds and respects behaviors that most adults consider inappropriate or downright stupid.

What I want to know is this: Do you know anyone who seems relatively well-behaved offline but behaves badly on Facebook? Or, conversely, do you know anyone who behaves badly on Facebook but not in real life?

–Jordan Miller