Assignment 3: Identity Change

During this assignment I had switched my identity to an older woman, in her late 20s. I had joined a psychological space, a chat room, and tried to portray myself as this fake older woman named “Margaret”. I managed my impressions in such a manner that I not use any slang or abbreviations and I claimed to have a steady job, have my own apartment, and other relevant things.
Within the chat room I said hello to everyone and had introduced “myself”. Not too long after, I had two people private message me: one whom seemed to have his mind on other things than chatting, so I blocked him and focused my assignment on the other man, Bill332. While corresponding to Bill332 he made comments on how I seemed sure about “myself” and praised what this fake self had done with my life. This in turn made both of us articulate ourselves in a different manner so that our speeches were compatible (I could tell when he would add in punctuations more than he had originally). It was interesting to see that after a little while of talking he started to really emphasize how he was intelligent and had a sense of humor.
Since the space was online and was limited to CMCs I portrayed “myself” in a manner that I thought would best portray a woman in her late 20s; I did not use any emotion icons, or over did the punctuation, my tone was much more serious. Needless to say while using online chat rooms that are solely CMC based will lead to much ambiguity but will also emphasize the aspects one wants to show (clarity).
Overall, we appeared to get what we had both wanted to portray about ourselves across to each other. But if this scenario had occurred face-to-face the outcome and the whole encounter would have had so much more simulation because there would be so many more cues shown (even unintentional ones). Looking at O’Sullivan’s model, online chatting has something pretty substantial going for it. With so much ambiguity someone can feel accepted in that space; even if they are pretending to be someone they are not. On the flip side, if someone ends up getting negative feedback it is actually, according to O’Sullivan, the more desired way to receive this feedback: mediated. Therefore, if this situation did play out in person and things did not work it would hurt the other person much more.