For this assignment we were asked to describe a relationship that has involved a substantial amount of mediated communication. I have experienced two long distance relationships, with boyfriends, which have involved mediated communication. Both relationships were quite different from one another so I will only describe one. I spent my freshman year of college studying at the University at Albany. When I left Albany to transfer to Cornell after my freshman year, I left behind a boyfriend of two months. We decided that we would stay together, long distance, as he lived in New Jersey and I lived in upstate New York. Also, after the summer I would be going to school in Ithaca and he would be in Albany, so in the foreseeable future we were never going to be in the same place.
I will select two of Mckenna’s relationship facilitation factors and relate them to this relationship. The first relationship facilitation factor is interactional control, which involves selective self-presentation. In the case of this relationship I found myself always thinking about the way I was going to present myself, and since my boyfriend was not usually with me I was able to do this a lot more. Everyday I had to select what I would tell him and how I would tell him things that were going on in my life. Therefore I left a lot of information out when I spoke with him thus influencing how I presented myself to him. Also, this can be related to self-disclosure in that I could selectively choose what I presented to him about myself. As it turns out this had a negative effect on our relationship because we did not get to know each other as well as we needed to in order to have a successful relationship.
The second facilitation factor I will use is getting the goods. Specifically the aspect of the relationship I can relate this factor to is getting to know his family. Getting the goods involves the ability to get information about others prior to an actual meeting, which is exactly how I got to know his family. Before I met them face to face, I learned all about what they were like through the descriptions my boyfriend gave me. We mostly talked online so most of the descriptions I got were through IM. When I actually met his family they were similar to his descriptions but also very different from the picture I had in my head.
The relationship lasted close to eight months before we both decided that having a relationship primarily based on CMC was just too difficult for us at this time in our lives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hey Catherine, I can definitly relate to the decision you had to make, I know how tough that kind of relationship can be. I was impressed with your insight about how Mckenna's factor of interactional control and selective self presentation allowed you to carefully decide which information to present to your boyfriend, and how this actually took a toll on your relationship by preventing you from getting to know one another. This was a very insightful analyses and a pleasure to read.
Hi Catherine,
I wonder why you were so concerned with your self-presentation? Was it that there were things you did not want your boyfriend to know or were you trying to manage his impression formation of you? Either one has a different set of implications, but I imagine that both might have played a role at various times. The cognitive dissonance theory might shed some light on your behavior. This is all speculation, so forgive me for my assumptions. But it’s possible that while you really wanted a great connection with your boyfriend, you also had some unmet needs presented by the distance, thus creating cognitive dissonance in trying to both establish a connection and fulfill your needs. In this case, CMC would not have helped you become more disinhibited because you were unable to remove gating features that you felt might have hurt the relationship. In turn, this may have caused your boyfriend to detect some deception and to then become more inhibited himself. This raises an interesting weakness in the theories we have learned so far. How do you hypothesize about CMC mediated relationship formation when the relationship has been established first with face-to-face interaction? It appears to change the dynamic of relationship facilitation because there already levels of identifiability, established gating features, and existing common ground that dictate your use of CMC in further relationship facilitation.
Link to my post: http://comm245purple.blogspot.com/2007/09/51-long-distance-friendship.html
Post a Comment