Entering a chat room as a woman brought a whole new target audience. When I signed up for a singles chat as “missnicegurl,” attention was automatically received. In real life, I am a 20 year old male but in the chat room I was a 20 year old female. Having the ratio of guys to girls now in my favor, the amount of individual chat sessions was alarming. Within the first 2 minutes of sitting idle in the chat room, I had 7 invitations for private conversations. After I dropped a simple hello, another 5 conversations popped up on my browser. I chose to pursue a conversation with a presumably male named “Cool guy.” He was trying to play the nice guy role but I could have been wrong and he actually was a nice guy. As we proceeded to chat, I kept my identity as hidden as possible with vague answers. He seemed pretty interested in getting to know each other, even after this being our first conversation.
With this being my first time doing the gender switch, I was on edge about how well I was playing the female role. As a male, I am completely unaware of the context and responses that a real woman would give, so I thought I had the possibility of being caught. As the conversation grew longer, I became more comfortable with the way I was responding and began to believe he didn’t suspect my identity switch. At the beginning, I thought keeping my responses brief and simple would keep him from knowing the truth but I am assuming that he was under the impression of my gender because of my screen name.
With the ability of changing my gender, I also had to change information about myself. I chose to reside in Manhattan, NY. I had recently moved here from Dallas, Texas because of a crazy ex boyfriend. Since being in NYC for the past 3 weeks, I was working for a local diner. Since I was trying to become someone that was new to the city and lonely, using key self descriptors was necessary. I began to say that since my recent break-up, I became lonely and was interested in meeting someone in the area. The attitude that I began to give off was that of loneliness. I portrayed myself to be a single woman living in Manhattan looking for someone to share my time with. This lonely little girl was reaching out to the world through online single’s chat rooms.
Revealing part of my personal identity and situation, I began to tell “Cool Guy” that he was apart of a class study. After informing him that he was really talking to a male pretending to be female and not a person from NYC, he began to accept the fact that he had been involved with a study and handled the situation well. With the lack of ability of seeing his (or her) real face, I am certain that they probably began to be more aware of the situation they put themselves in within the online chatting community.
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6 comments:
Hey, I actually did the same assignment as you (switching genders). I liked how you described the fact that in the beginning, you were nervous about getting caught, but as time went on, you grew more accustomed to the position and that fear somewhat dissolved. I, too, had that experience. Once I realized that the person I was talking to truly believed I was a girl, it was almost as if I assumed the role of the girl and consequently, had no problem. In addition, like your experience, at the end of my conversation, I broke the news that I was a male conducting a communication experiment. I felt bad, but he handled it quite well.
Criticism: I do not see where you explained how the space affected your presentation of “self.” I feel you could have easily analyzed your experience in terms of the “self-presentational tactics,” such as social associations (NYC)… overall, I feel that you lack deep analysis, but everything else is fine.
Hey, sounds like this was a successful gender switch. I also chose the option to switch my gender in a chat room. Me being female I switched to a male, however I also increased my age by 7 years to really get away from my true identity. Like you, I made immediate impressions of my target. One thing you failed to include was the presentation of your "self". You explained the qualities that your new identity possessed but did not lable them as what type of self they fell into. Great job otherwise!
Hey, I'm Brendan Suhrland. I'm very intrigued by your experience, because although I too decided to do a gender switch, your experience seemed to have a lot more substance. You actually had an entire background for your alter ego, one that was pretty convincing in my opinion.
My chat involved more sexual than nonsexual conversation, and even when the discussion strayed away from lewd topics, I found myself using "lol," "rofl," and "omg" a whole lot. In all, I could really have just been a chat bot designed to give automatic answers, and it would have been almost the same thing from my chat partner's perspective. It is unfortunate, because I was hoping for a more interesting experience, one like yours. But congratulations, because it sounds like you pulled everything off pretty well!
Sounds like you were one of few who had a successful gender switch in the chat rooms. I wanted to switch my gender (become a female) in a chat room but I felt that it would be very difficult. The fact that you were able to keep your cool under this pressure situation was awesome and I congratulate you for being able to stick with it the whole time and not give off any bad cues. Its funny though that you came out and told him that you were conducting a study instead of just closing out of the window and probably never talking to him again. I wonder what he thought about the situation now.
I'm a little distressed that so many people in this class had successful gender-switches! It sounds like you had a generally pleasant experience. I can't help but wonder how you came up with your fake identity. Your Manhattan dwelling waitress with a crazy ex-boyfriend fits into the stereotypical wanting-to-be actress females in the city category. What aspects of your personality did she reflect?
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