A few years ago, I tried out for and made a soccer team that played international competition in Israel. The team was made up of girls from across the country, and most of us had never met before. A few weeks before the team got together, we were provided with each other's emails. Immediately we all began getting to know one another since we were going to be doing everything with each other for the month that we were going to be traveling together. Over those few weeks, I became close with many of the girls, solely by our Instant Messenger conversations. However, there was one girl that I developed a really close friendship with even before we had ever met. She is still one of my best friend's today.
I believe that this opposes the Ramirez and Wang study for many reasons. First, our entire friendship was based on the fact that we both knew we would be meeting each other within the next few weeks. This is different from many of the studies on CMC v. FtF relationships since most of those develop out of two strangers meeting online, and having the ability to meet in real life but it not necessarily happening. This was not the case for me, so with both of us already expecting to meet each other, we were very truthful and open about what we chose to speak about. Our eventual meeting and subsequent continued friendship was even better than it was in CMC rather than Ramirez and Wang's theory that our friendship should have suffered in a negative and disappointing way. It has been three years, and we are still extremely close.
Another contradiction to this model is the notion of long term versus short term and how to define these. While my friend and I onyl conversed for a few weeks before we met, our conversations were really enjoyable, in depth and long. Some would look to classify this as a short term association, which would agree with the Ramirez and Wang hypothesis that short term associations in CMC will provide for social information to be evaluated more positively. But, on the other hand, others including myself would consider the interactions long term since not only did we interact a lot within those few weeks, but we also knew that our interaction would continue more long term offline since we would be playing on a team together. This interpretation of the interaction means that my situation conflicts with the Ramirez and Wang study since they predict that long term associations will provide for social information to be evaluated more negatively. My situation was and still is being evaluated positively.
I would agree with Joseph Walther's Social Information Processing theory in regards to my situation. While my friendship did initially develop online, Ally and I became closer and closer as we finally met and time went on. Our online conversations were extremely interesting, enjoyable, and we did learn a lot about each other, but it was not until we actually met and could experience things together that our friendship solidified. All of our initial online perceptions of each other eventually faded and were either confirmed or simply replaced with other feelings. I would not per se say that my impressions of Ally were "negative" online, but since we learned so much about one another in such a short amount of time, I hardly expected that we could have become closer. I expected that our friendship would dwindle, and the hyperpersonal model would take effect in that our extremely close friendship would start to perish as we actually met. However, I was wrong and to this day, Ally and I still remain best friends. This is why I think that the SIP model fits our relationship the best. While it does not necessarily show a contradiction between my online relationship and my offline relationship, it does show an online to offline success story!
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/11-so-i-guess-im-your-roommate.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/11-this-is-embarrassing.html
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I thought your blog was very well written and I like the comment that you made about the Ramirez and Wang study, “…with both of us already expecting to meet each other, we were very truthful and open about what we chose to speak about.” I wonder how much the expectations of meeting someone from online influence the way in which relationships are formed and how they might change when leaving virtuality. I also found out that my relationship did not support Ramirez and Wang’s theory but I think it had many influencing factors such as the expectation to meet FtF from the beginning, and (similar to yours) short-term versus long-term conversation in CMC.
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