Omitting online dating, one of the best ways to meet someone online is by talking on real time in chat rooms. Having not been in a chat room since my tween and early teen years, I was not sure what type of chat room to enter and what to talk about other than the typical age, sex, and gender. My friends and I used to go into the AOL chat rooms and find people to talk to, whether we were talking to them as ourselves or as completely different people, which is a large fear of talking to strangers online. So this is exactly what I did again; because I have not been in a chat room in about eight years, I decided to play it safe by going into a kids chat room so as to avoid any teens with problems needing to open up or singles looking for a mate. The first chat room that I entered was not age appropriate, so after searching for another site I ended up on www.kidschat.net.
When first joining in as a 13 year old girl from Chicago, the conversations were slightly dull and uneventful; however, after I started talking to a 13 year old boy, Jared, from Florida about TV and movies, I found my original impressions of online chat rooms to be different than I had expected. I expected my impressions of people to follow the Social Identification / Deindividuation model by allowing myself to make over attributions and inferences about people based on minimal information. I assumed that many of the boys in this chat room and many of the girls in this chat room would be stereotyped in the same categories based on the lack of information and communication. He turned out to be a very nice boy. We began discussing our favorite movies TV shows and books; I was even able to convince him to admit, although he was embarrassed to do so, that he loves the Harry Potter series. We talked about movies and TV and even our favorite and lease favorite subjects in school until I told him that my mother called me down for dinner.
What I found out as I kept talking to Jared is that only some aspects of him did I form impressions based on the SIDE model. I formed impressions on other aspects of Jared’s, like his views of movies and TV, based on the Social Information Processing theory. The parts of his life in which I actually took the time to talk to him about helped me develop my own social impression of him and not just use social heuristics based on the typical 13 year old boy from Florida to form an impression of him.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Laura,
It sounds like you had a difference experience from most of students, because you chose a kids' blog. I find it interesting that you chose to present yourself as a 13 year old from Chicago. Obviously that led to different types of topics. You acted convincingly as the 13 year old boy continued to have a conversation. Leaving the chat room with the excuse that your mother called highlights how social cues are easily filtered out online.
Post a Comment