Synchronous online environments have never been appealing to me. After a few brief stints in AOL chats rooms with my middle school girlfriends, I decided that online chat rooms were an environment that I did not want to be a part of. While asynchronous environments (facebook, email) are an integral part of my everyday routine, they pretty much limit my social use of the Internet. So for this assignment I decided that I would return to an online chat room and see how my opinion might change. Since my knowledge of how to join and online chat room is minimal, at best, I decided to simply Google search “chat rooms” and see what I could come up with. To my surprise, it was difficult to enter a live chat! Most websites required that I put in a lot of personal information that I was unwilling to provide. One site even took me through five pages of questions (to which I generally lied) and not until the last page did it ask for credit card information (despite calling itself free-chat.com). Finally, I stumbled upon a chat room where the only required information was a desired screenname, date of birth, and email. The anonymity was important in my search for a place to meet an individual online.
I entered the college chat group on chat-avenue.com, and found myself immediately bombarded by a rapidly flowing conversation between several individuals who all seemed to understand what was going on while I had no clue. After several failed attempts to join the conversation with common introductions such as “Hi everybody, how are you all?” I finally decided to throw a somewhat lewd comment into the conversation to see what kind of response I would get. Immediately many of the obviously male screennames responded to me, and shortly thereafter I received more than 1 invitation for a private chat. I have to admit that my middle school impression of chat rooms was pretty spot on. I decided to accept a chat with Cartman, who had been responsive to my suggestions in the group chat, but not overwhelmingly inappropriate.
My initial impression of Cartman was skeptical because of the environment in which we met: Sunday night at midnight in a free Internet chat room. I suppose I wouldn’t take anybody I met in such a space seriously. However he seemed open and enthusiastic about learning about my personality. We immediately bonded over a shared knowledge of the French language, but his responses to my chat would get scarce when I asked questions about him. He was perfectly willing to learn about me, but not too willing to share about himself. In this sense, I didn’t consider him particularly open or extraverted. He was, however, very agreeable. After changing the subject when I, early in the conversation, asked for his age, he later asked for my age to which I truthfully responded 21. He immediately responded “21! Me too!” When I immediately told him I didn’t believe it, he responded “You’re right. But I am old Katie.” He certainly was trying to appease whatever I had to say. He displayed a certain level of conscientiousness once I discovered he was inappropriately chatting in a college chat room, but not before that point, when he eagerly responded to any lewd or sexual comments with enthusiasm.
Although I only spoke with Cartman for about 45 minutes, my impression of his personality was more in line with the CFO prediction than any other theoretical perspective. The very limited range of discussion and his unwillingness to honestly answer my questions didn’t anger me, but rather made be neutral to the subject, and uninterested in continuing the conversation. My overall experience was not one that I am eager to repeat. Although I do consider certain online interactions essential in my daily life, chat rooms are certainly not one of them. I truly believe that face-to-face interaction is a much more important social skill to master.
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4 comments:
"I truly believe that face-to-face interaction is a much more important social skill to master."
I completely agree with this comment since I too find that CMC interaction lacks the same cues that you were unable to find in the chat with Cartman. These synchronous chat rooms all share the common lack of formality. Upon entering the room people are very quick to ask a/s/l then move the conversation to "cybering" if you happened to answer those questions to their liking. It is funny how this is normal in the CMC world, yet if sexual suggestions were ever made to us FTF within the first five minutes of conversation we would more than likely walk away or worse. Has this made you wonder whether the online space is slowly deteriorating social skills?
I am surprised to read that you were able to stay neutral on the impressions you formed within this personal chat. I am inclined to wonder if this is because you kept in mind the task at hand and therefore tried to defy strong impression formation either consciously or subconsciously.
I agree with Sophia that online space is eroding our social skills, especially if the chatters are young in their teens.
I think you make really excellent points, Katie, and your chat experience closely mirrored mine. I too found the online chatroom experience discomforting, distasteful and further confirmed my prejudices of what people in sychronous chatrooms are like. I liked how you worked the 5 personality traits into your impression of "Cartman."
It seems like your CMC impression was not shared by many of us, and I wonder if you really feel neutral about "Cartman" even though you seemed be leery of online chatrooms in general. Do you really think the types to enter these chatrooms are unstriking in their personality traits, or might they have extreme personalities to be an anonymous, if dishonest online chatter?
My experience with synchronous chat rooms was very similar to yours. I also entered a chat room without great expectations, even very poor stereotypical expectations. Upon entering, I also found myself overwhelmed with a slew of responses. I didn't need to enter any personal information, however. The fact you had to shows a lower degree of anonymity in your synchronous space.
I find it interesting how you were able to alter various details of yourself while online. I found it hard to provide false information when asked for my a/s/l.
I also left with a CFO impression because my target was also evasive in regards to providing cues. I felt slightly negative towards the person I interacted with, and he seemed uncommonly complementary. Though my apprehension could be my general dislike of anonymous chat rooms.
Katie,
Our experiences were surprisingly similar. I too had no idea where to start, Googled “chat rooms,” and ended up at www.chat-avenue.com. I too found it difficult to join the group discussion, and even more interestingly, the person I chatted with was hesitant to reveal information about himself (just like “Cartman”), yet eager to learn about me.
I think where we differ is in how our private conversations were initiated, and perhaps this had some impact on our impression formations. I chose to invite a random person to chat rather than to provoke invites from others. As a result, I had no preconceived notions as to what “Eric” was interested in responding to, and a little bit more control over where the conversation went. Perhaps because “Cartman” responded to a lewd comment, you distanced yourself from him subconsciously from the get-go. I think that if I had taken the same approach as you, this is exactly what I would have done because I wouldn’t likely be interested in a serious interaction with someone of that sort. However, my impressions of “Eric” in my own experience were more inline with the Hyperpersonal model – particularly since with no preconceived notions, and very little information, the over attribution process was easily applicable to my impression formation.
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