For this assignment I chose Option 1 and once again entered a synchronous space, but this time I was a male, and more specifically, my boyfriend. I was excited to be the opposite sex and interested to see how women outside of my little world talked to men when they met them online. The first shock that I should have expected when I entered the chat room was that nobody wanted to talk to me. When I entered last week as a female, I was immediately bombarded with private messages by men who wanted to "chat." As a man, nobody took interest in me and for once I had to make the effort to find someone who would want to pm. After several unsuccessful attempts, I finally got a 16 year old girl to talk to me.
At the start of the conversation, it was not hard for me to lie about my age or sex (I was a 21 year old male). Also, describing myself was not difficult because I envisioned my boyfriend and from there was able to further deceive her. As the conversation continued, I did not want to over exaggerate how testosterone driven I was because I was worried she may catch on that I was not in fact who I said I was. I found myself using self-presentational tactics such as my own self-description and attitude expressions. I wanted this girl to not only think I was an older, more intelligent guy, but also that I was cool. As the conversation progressed I found myself wanting to further impress this girl and discussed my "fraternity" affiliations, this would be seen as a social association. Throughout the conversation, however, I did find it difficult at times to give her immediate responses because I constantly had to check whether what I was saying sounded too feminine and therefore had to be conscientious with my writing. I did not want to catch myself saying the word "like" which I myself use too often or using other phrases or ways of writing that would cue her to something fishy. Eventually this girl sent me a picture of her and in turn was hoping that I would send her a picture of myself. I began to get worried because this was not a part of my plan, so I kindly excused myself from the chat.
I realized that besides the self-presentational tactics I used, I also tapped into my "multiple selves." As a guy, I would want myself to be cool, smart, well liked; all of these were a part of my "ideal (male) self" and was how I presented myself in the chat. Also, finding it impossible to not tap into my own personality in the chat, I also presented some of my "actual self" as well as "ought self" during discussion of certain topics which I personally have a strong opinion about. Overall, this experience fulfilled some of my curiosities as well as gave me insight to how easy online deception is due to the lack of the usual ftf cues.
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After seeing this title I knew I had to choose this blog to comment on because it was a topic that I had actually thought about and was hoping that someone would have done. Making an image for yourself had to of been very easy since the image you were going with was of your boyfriend. Its had to of been fun trying to become your boyfriends spitting image since you now had to literally become him and think like him now. An issues you faced was trying to get a female to talk to you, which seems to be a problem for all males online because I faced this same situation last week.
Ounce you found your new buddy to talk to it was interesting how challenging it was to talk like a “guy” from the female point of view. You had to speak with a certain tone, act cool, and impress the 16-year-old girl all with out delaying or stalling, which would have given off some bad vibes. Its amazing though how anonymous we really are when we are chatting online, since we don’t really know who the person on the other end is. In this situation she sent you a picture but who knows if that was really her? That could have been a male class mate of ours doing the same project switching genders and age and hoping you wouldn’t realize that he is pretending to be someone that he is not.
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