I revealed something interesting when I asked my friends about one of the services that windows offered: windows live spaces. Most of my Chinese friends used it a lot, while almost all of my American friends don’t know about it. Windows live space is like a personal blog, which can be obtained by anyone who has a windows live account. People can decorate their spaces with background music, self-design background style, photo albums, blogs entries (which mostly are used for diaries) and things alike. People who visit other’s spaces can leave comments.
Using my windows live space as my online digital diary, I am quite familiar with these special asynchronical, persistent, optionally anonymous (you can choose whether or not if your name will show up on the comments you made) psychological spaces on the net, and I decided to observe a target from this network. It’s not hard to find a person that I never know before; I quickly enter a space named: “Fang’s secret garden”, via my friends’ friend list.
The background color is black, and the music is light classic piano, which reveals a hint of sadness. This gives me an impression that the master of this “garden” is a quiet, young, Chinese (the version of this Live Space is Chinese) girl, whose name might be “Fang”. As girls are more likely to put their photos in the albums in live spaces, I find the albums and quickly proved that I am right about her gender, race, and approximate age. As one of her albums named “first day of work”, in which she is sitting in a large sofa in a meeting room, I made a quick guess that she’s class of 07, and is already an office lady now.
For blog posts, most people, like me, use them like diaries and post stories of themselves. Sometimes I doubt who will read my stupid stories and have interest in my newly bought shoes and clothes…anyways, Fang’s posts are mostly about her daily life stories and her feelings. She wants to own a cat; she thinks one of her friends is isolating her for no reason which annoyed her a lot; her sister gave birth to a baby, and she is really happy for her…
Given more time, I believe that I can picture a routine life of a normal girl, but I have to say that by “listening” to her stories, I begin to like this normal girl. All those feeling-presences give me a warm feeling about Fang, and make me feel close to her and her life, which I doubt if I can get from FtF. She is a little bit neuroticism (she is sensitive about other’s feeling towards her); she is quit open about her life and feelings; she is agreeable and supportive, she is always willing to help others…
I think my observation make more sense under hyperpersonal model. People choose the aspects that they’d like to present to others, and pay more attention to their minds, feelings and thoughts. This selective self-presentation may cause over-attribution process as people might be too concern about certain aspects of themselves. But the various resources of information in live space: background style, music, photos…may help visitors get a more complete image about this person. The comments system offers behavioral confirmation from other people… I cant tell in this case which way of communication would offer more information: In FtF, maybe we can know better about how this person smile, how her voice sounds…, but will we be aware of what is in her mind while she is smiling?
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2 comments:
It's interesting how you assumed she was a girl because she posted pictures online. I never came to this conclusion before because I know many guys who also post pictures.
It is interesting how a blog was able to portray so much information to you. I wonder if a frequent user's impression would vary compared to a person who does not frequent blogs a lot. It seems this asynchronous environment allowed "Fang" to express many social cues to you the audience. Could her use of music be a form of auditory cue?
Though her entries were daily actions, this might reveal her personality in various situations - at school, shopping, with friends, or in stressful situations.
This psychological space sounds a lot more comprehensive than any single one we have covered, because it's a combination of social networking, blogs and forums, among other things. And since people freely share their life stories on it (it's really asynchronous, since you can read years into her life in a few hours), it's hardly a typical CMC.
But the self-presentation part is highly selective here, because there are so many pieces of information you can choose to present about yourself. But I'm interested in how much the audience factor played into the whole impression-forming process. You said that the environment is mostly for people who already know each other. She probably knows the people visiting her "garden" so she would have more inhibitions, since her online persona can't deviate too much from her real-life image. I wonder how that affected your impression of her? Is your impression closer to her actual self than if you met her in a chatroom or facebook?
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