My friend “Charlie” was very much into online chat rooms back in high school. It was in one of these chat rooms that he met a girl named “Sarah”. They met randomly one day and enjoyed talking to each other, so they exchanged screen names began to chat on AIM. For more than a year he and Sarah spoke almost every day. Over the summer break between our junior and senior years of high school, he found out that Sarah was coming to the area to visit family near New York City. They arranged to see each other in the city and he was ecstatic about the chance to finally meet her.
When he got back from their meeting in the city he was very disappointed. He told me that Sarah was nothing like what he had expected. She had been so outgoing when they were chatting online, yet she was very shy in person. As they were talking face-to-face he realized that they did not share as much in common as he had thought. Additionally, he said that she was not as attractive as he had expected. The experience was a very powerful one for him and afterward he and Sarah chatted less and soon stopped communicating altogether.
Charlie’s experience fits very well with the factors and results of the Ramirez and Wang paper. Because he and Sarah had been chatting in the CMC environment for more than a year, their relationship can be considered a long-term association. Ramirez and Wang found that when a modality switch occurs from CMC to face-to-face for long-term associated partners, the results are that the social information will be more unexpected, more relationally important, evaluated more negatively, and will be uncertainty provoking.
The social information presented to Charlie in the face-to-face meeting pertaining to Sarah’s personality, along with the fact that he found they had very little in common, was definitely unexpected and important to the relationship. This can be explained by the fact that, over their long period of correspondence, Charlie had developed an idea in his mind as to what Sarah would be like using the principle of the Hyperpersonal Model. The idea here is that the few social cues he was given in CMC were exaggerated into stereotypes and (in this case) perceived as common ground. Also going along with Ramirez and Wang’s results, the new social information he received in the face-to-face interaction only proved to provoke uncertainty by going against his previous beliefs that Sarah was outgoing and gorgeous and caused him to evaluate this new social information more negatively, eventually leading to the end of their relationship.
I commented on:
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/assignment-11-online-relationship-gone.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/11-so-i-guess-im-your-roommate.html
2 comments:
Wow, this is definitely one of the more extreme instances of the effects of a modality switch. You mentioned that he met her “randomly” in an online chat room. Perhaps it was actually a chat room focused on a particular topic? He may have thought he shared a lot in common with her based on this online environment. But once removed from CMC, group identity would take a back seat to individual differences. This explanation may contribute to the overall negative impression formed when leaving virtuality (although the hyperpersonal model definitely plays a part here, too).
What an interesting post. This analysis fits perfectly with Ramirez and Wang's paper on meeting someomne FtF after communicating via CMC for a long period of time. Posts like these make one wonder about the effectiveness of websites like eHarmony.com - if people were to communicate online for long periods of time after viewing a laundry list of interests from an online profile, would they soon be disappointed by the individual they meet in person? I also find it a shame that URT didn't work in Charlie's favor. After communicating with someone for so long, not enjoying that person's company FtF can be extremely frustrating after the large investment you've made in the relationship.
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