Our study of online relationships this year has focus primarily on distinguishing between computer mediated communication (CMC) and face to face(FtF) communication. In the latest article we examined by Ramirez and Wang the interaction of the two was considered, primarily when a relationship moves from CMC and the online world to FtF and the real world. One such personal experience I had was my freshman year here at Cornell. Like many freshman, I knew very few people at the school before arriving. Not wanting to leave my social life to chance, I took advantage of a newer tool that the internet offered: Facebook.
Using Facebook I was able to find and contact other people with similar interests and backgrounds. One person in particular I talked to a lot through CMC, hoping that the online correspondence might bloom into a friendship once we arrived on campus. Through his profile and text communication, I formed an impression of him, mostly based on what personal tastes and interests he had and other social cues I picked up. When we finally met on move in day, I was very surprised to find we were fairly different, and the friendship did not go very far beyond the occasional dinner in the dining hall and friendly “hellos” when walking on campus.
My initial search for people on Facebook on the basis of similar interests lends itself nicely to a Social Identification/Deindividuation (SIDE) model of online interaction. I looked for people that I could identify with and classify as the same “social category” as myself. With the friend identified above, this in particular was music and a more liberal political view. This combination immediately placed him in my mind right along with my group of friends back home, who all shared similar tastes. From this grouping, I formed a personality and look for this person based on my experiences with my friends from high school.
When move in day arrived, this initial impression was essentially shattered. He was very friendly, but had a much different manner than what I had envisioned from our text chats. Talking further with him removed him further from any social group that I could identify with. SIDE theory predicts that individual differences undermine social attraction. In moving from online to the real world, many of the perceived similarities that made us part of the same social group were dominated by the flood of new verbal and social cues that differentiated us. Based on this loss of group salience and increase in visual identifiableness, SIDE predicts a negative outcome when moving a relationship from CMC to real life. This prediction was supported by personal experience.
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3 comments:
Interesting post. I like how you tied SIDE to the friendship attraction first online and then when you went offline. I've found it weird making friends with people out of the blue on the internet without having met in real life. I always feel there is never enough to know a person; the act of interacting with another person face to face generates something that is missed in CMC. As a result I’ve had little experience moving from online first to FtF second.
Chris,
I enjoyed reading your blog post. You do a good job of tying in concepts from class into your post. The experience you describe supports the findings we have discussed in class. I had a similar experience, but used a different tool to find people--the Class of 2008 site, since Facebook was primarily used by current college students at the time; I joined Facebook in the fall of my freshman year, after arriving at school.
Great job!
I def think that being an ingroup member makes it easier to meet someone online. Your experiences seem typical of incoming collge students who search for ingroup members such as those in the same dorm as themselves.
Great Post.
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