Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Feeling at Home..... Away from Home
Two years ago I left my home in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada for my senior year of high school. I was at a school called Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox, Saskatchewan, Canada. Wilcox is a town of approximately six hundred people including the three hundred students. I shared a room with two of my teammates and enjoyed my experience although it was awfully difficult to communicate with my friends back home. Not only was there no reception in Wilcox in order use a cell phone but there was also no internet access in my room. The only internet access that I had was in the computer lab. Needless to say asynchronous communication became my only way of communicating with my friends from home. My close friends and I created a facebook group in order to stay in touch. We found this an easy way to check up on how everyone was doing and to give each other a hard time if they had not scored in a few games, since the majority of us were hockey players. Every once in a while the jokes would get old and some guys would be in a real slump so we would offer each other advice and support, which demonstrated the reciprocity in our group. We held each other accountable to staying in touch by making comments like “where has that ghost Kody been?” poke fun at someone until they responded; we just found a way to make it fun for all of us. I was also in a much broader social network with other friends from home but the commitment of staying in touch with those people was not even comparable to the concentrated group that my closer friends had formed. Since we all either attended school together or played hockey with or against each other we shared a common ground that we could all connect with. There was not a single person in the group who was not “in the loop” or unable to understand an inside joke. As the year moved along we found ourselves just as close as we had been before we all left home so when we all got back together in the summer it was like we were never even gone.
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2 comments:
Hey Gallagher,
Your situation was very interesting. I can't imagine being in a place with no Internet access in my room or phone reception. It just goes to show you how something as simple as a Facebook group can keep you in contact with your close friends, even with the limited access to different media.
Your online community seemed to be very supportive of each other and shared a lot of common ground through hockey playing and attending the same high school. One could take it a step further and identify these people as your strong ties and the other people from your hometown who you were not committed to keeping in touch with as weak ties. I’m glad to see that you could use CMC to keep your community strong. Great post!
I agree with Ian. In today's world, it's hard to imagine being in a situation without cell phone reception or internet access. I think it is great that you use facebook to keep in touch with friends, and not only do you use facebook, but that you created a group to keep your friendships something special. It sounds like you and your friends had strong ties through this facebook group. I wonder if this would have differed had you been able to call them, or if they came up to visit more often. Because of the lack of FtF communication, and you were pretty much 'forced' into this situation, did you form strong ties because you had to keep in touch, and this was the only way possible? Do you think it would have turned out the same if you did have cell phone reception and internet access outside of the computer lab? Do you think this has something to do with timing, and how often you were able to communicate with your friends?
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