For this assignment I chose the first option and I decided to pick a chat room as the psychological space, since I now knew how to use one. I used the same website that I used for the last assignment, http://www.chatfamily.com/, however went into the adult chat room this time around, for people 18 and older. Since I had the opportunity to change my identity I figured I'd play an older man, because when else am I going to do something like that. I decided that since I was pretending to be a man, I would chat with a woman and see what it felt like to be on the other side of the conversation.
I entered the chat room and found that there had already been a lot of sexual comments made in the conversation, as I had expected. I watched the conversation for a minute before I took part in the chat with simply "hey everyone". The username I picked was a stereotypical male username; hockeyguy76. I mostly got responses from what I thought to be females. After a couple minutes I entered a private chat with one of these potential targets, cutechick11. We covered the basics first; name, sex, age. Then we went into more details like what she enjoyed doing and what her hobbies were. She seemed like she was maybe trying to be the typical girl who enjoyed shopping, getting her nails done, and hanging out with friends. This made me think that maybe she was also taking on an alternate persona, which in itself made me form an impression that she may be dishonest.
Using the self presentation model to present myself was difficult in this situation because I was not actually presenting myself, but a fake person. However, I still presented some of myself because I was trying to act out the impressions I have of an older man. When talking to cutechick11 I mostly used my "ought self" becuase I was trying to act how I thought I should be acting. According to what I told my target, I was 25 years old, a hockey player, very tall, lived in brooklyn, and was looking for a relationship. I told her that I graduated from an Ivy league university, was really athletic and that I was really active in my community. This is a form of me expressing my "ideal self" as these are two qualities that I have always strived to possess.
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First off, well done! I thoroughly enjoyed your post. I like the fact that you chose to work in the same chat room as before, because since you were more familiar with it inexperience wouldn't really be a factor that would limit your ability to interact with other people online.
I can understand why you felt it was difficult to apply the self presentation model to this situation, due to the fact that you were not playing yourself. I think it's interesting, however, that although you were pretending to be a 25 year old man, that you still applied some of the atrributes you see as positive in your own life, whether you possess these attributes, or you hope to possess them, to the man you were pretending to be. Not only were you acting out your impressions of an older man, but you were also applying attributes that you would like to possess to the character that you were playing online. My main suggestion for improvement is that you could have perhaps explored in more depth the role that audience and interaction space had on the "self" that you presented.
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