Chatting online using mIRC (assignment 2)

In order to complete the second assignment, I decided to join a chat room, because I thought it would be a guaranteed way of meeting someone randomly and being able to interact with them. I chose mIRC because I had no idea where to go to find a chat room, and I knew about this program. When I first joined, all of the default channels seemed to have little activity, so I decided to look for a random channel on a subject I would know well. I eventually entered the channel #wow, which I thought would mean "World of Warcraft," but it actually stood for "Women of Warcraft." Nevertheless, it seemed to have some activity, and the discussion was essentially about the game, so I decided to stay. It made for an interesting experience, but also one that I have encountered before when talking to online gamers.

My experience in the chat room was quite uneventful at first. I was talking to someone who had just come back to playing Warcraft after having taken a 6 month break. After some discussion, I had mentioned that I had just recently quit playing the game (which is actually true), which then incited the wrath of someone with a little too much time on his hands. For the sake of his privacy, I won't use his online nickname. As much as I wanted to avoid an online brawl, I decided to engage this individual. After a moderately long period of unfriendly interaction, I felt as though I had seen enough. I think that the beginning of the chat was the most representative of this individual's behavior, so I have included a screen-shot of the beginning of our chat.

This individual was rude, cold, and downright nasty. I would honestly have to say he was slightly neurotic and very extraverted, but far from being agreeable or conscientious. I cannot comment on his openness, because our conversation did not address the necessary topics. We didn't really try to find out much about each other with interpersonal probes: our conversation was more of a "flame war" than anything.

At first, I wanted to say that my experience matched the over-attribution processes of the Hyperpersonal model, but then I realized something: after talking to this individual, I had no clue to what he was really like. My first reaction to his kind of communication is to say he is a hostile person, but to be honest, I have seen his behavior online from many people who are agreeable in real life, including myself (I am almost always quite friendly, but I have said some nasty things online). He could have been angry at something else (perhaps losing in Warcraft) and just displaced his frustration on me. By the way he talked I could tell he was male, but I couldn't decipher much beyond that. Therefore, I would say my experience matched the CFO perspective.