I understand that we take "relationships" in this scenario to mostly mean romantic ones, but I just don't really have any faith in long-distance romantic relationships. However, I do find it convenient and sometimes liberating to maintain friendships over the internet. And since friendships can be equally equivocal as romances, my friendships online can fit quite easily into this topic.
I have this friend whom I haven't seen in 6 years. We first met in person 6 and a half years ago, then she moved to another state and we haven't seen each other since. But I would count her as one of my few best friends, and most of this precious friendship is built over the internet. Before she moved, we were not much more than mere acquaintances. But we kept in touch via e-mails for a few years and got to know each other quite intimately that way.
We met through our families, so Walther's Social Identity Processing Theory definitely applies (even though this was a FtF situation). We are about the same age, and we share an ethnic background, so we assumed that we shared many other things such as political views and views on life in general. Disregarding how similar we actually were, we at least assumed that we had a lot of common ground and therefore got along quite nicely.
Due to these special circumstances, this friendship takes parts of both the Wallace attraction factors AND the McKenna relationship facilitation factors. The common ground factor mentioned above is both a Wallace and a McKenna factor.
Proximity, a Wallace factor, is also crucial to our friendship because we would always reply as soon as we could to each other's e-mails, so we had come to expect the immediateness and responsiveness of the e-mails. We could count on an answer from each other, and it became routine for us. This sense of familiarity led to comfort when we self-disclosed.
The Disinhibition Effects were pronounced in our friendship. Even though we already met FtF and were quite "identifiable" to each other (a McKenna factor), we were still far enough geographically that she could not affect my life immediately if I self-disclosed and told her some secret about me. She couldn't exactly fly in from out-of-state and tell all my friends in school my embarrassing childhood memories or my current emotions and concerns. Again, our friendship was CMC so there was always that barrier between physical and online realities. We already knew what each other looked like, but the visual anonymity of the e-mails still helped with our self-disclosure.
Personally I'm really thankful for the e-mails. Otherwise I would lose a potential best friend simply because she's not physically close to me anymore. Across time and space, Internet does have its perks.
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2 comments:
I think your take on the relationship factor was really interesting. I was thinking about romantic relationships and found an article that showed how one man’s online obsession negatively impacted his real life. But, I definitely agree with you that online friendships can become very meaningful to people and looking back, I can see that sometimes I was more honest during the year with “camp friends” who lived miles and miles away rather than my friends from home. Those relationships were important to me and proximity did not stop us from remaining friends.
Hi Yang,
I found your blog post very interesting to read. Because I do not have any personal experience with the relationship dynamic you explained, I found it intriguing to read how you have been able to maintain a relationship with your friend for six years now and even more importantly, establish such a close relationship. In my experience, my closest friendships usually form as a result of physical proximity. For example, my best friend throughout high school just so happened to be in the same classes and clubs as me. So, at first, it was hard for me to understand your experience. After reading your post, however, I think you gave a great description of your relationship and showed how features of mediated communication actually facilitated the friendship. This just makes me question one thing you first mentioned about long distance romantic relationships. If your relationship with a friend through long distance is so successful and satisfying, why not have faith in romantic long distance relationships as well?
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