While I was wasting time on Sunday afternoon, I came across a message board specifically targeted to men. It’s a place where users come to interact in an environment catered to issues regarding men’s health. For example, there is a sub-forum entitled “Fitness” where guys talk about their workout routines and what protein shakes they are drinking. Another is called “Sexual Health” where guys can talk about that weird bump that won’t go away or how to last longer in bed.
Specifically, I was reading a thread in the “Love and Life” section. This is where guys come to talk and receive advice about their relationships or career problems. This thread was titled “my marriage is on the rocks” and was about a husband (his handle was YumyDub, I will call him YD) who suspected his wife of cheating on him with the neighbor. In this thread, he gave many details of how he would come home from work and find the neighbor and his wife platonically sitting on their porch talking. YD explained, over the course of a month he would increasingly find the two together with apparently innocent excuses. At first he was not worried, but now as he was posting online, he was getting suspicious.
The thread was a few weeks old and thus had many replies by the time I got to it. By the responses YD gave, I could tell he was an open and honest person. He was on an anonymous forum seeking advice about his marriage signaled that he was mature and was legitimately trying to save his marriage. Relating my impression of YD to the 5 personality traits: YD was fairly conscientious and agreeable. He was polite and replied to everyone and typed in complete sentences. He listened to everyone's opinions and tried to make rational choices. He is slightly neurotic because he over-analyzes every detail of his interactions with his wife trying to find hidden clues about her affair. He is not very extroverted because he did not uncover too many details in his postings but needed fellow users to probe him.
Ultimately, I feel like my impression of YD is highly intense because I learned a lot of personal details of his marriage, but do not know his age, profession, etc limiting the breadth of my experience. I feel as though my experience with YD had elements of Social Information Processing Theory and the Hyperpersonal Model because although my observation was only through the thread, over the many pages of responses I felt like I got to know who YD was. However, over-attribution process says that since we only talked about his marriage problems, I cannot really know how he may act in other situations. This could lead to the selective self-presentation by portraying YD as the victim evoking empathy from his readers.
Overall, my experience on the forum was positive and I felt like I got to know YD on a personal level through solely forum posts.
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1 comment:
This was a very interesting blog post! I like how you related the different theories to this poor man and his marriage. It's odd how some people have no qualms about sharing their most intimate lives with strangers publically.
I find it strange, however, that you describe him as slightly neurotic. I would be upset too if I suspected my wife were cheating on me! I wouldn't go and talk to users on an asynchronous message board, though, so you might have a point.
This was a really good example of the Hyperpersonal Model since you only knew about the aspect of his marriage that was upsetting to him and not other areas of his life. I agree with the over-attribution as an explanation for your impressions of YD, but I also think you can argue that behavioral confirmation played a role too. As he became more and more like the "victim", people percieved him more as an unfortunate guy which reinforced his behavior as the victim in a positive feedback loop. Sounds like you also couldn't experience situational observation (observation of a person in a variety of contexts) either, since the single topic at hand was his marriage problem.
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