After the initial acceptance letter, the mailed document most important and exciting to an accepted Cornell student is the housing information, that is what dorm you are placed in and who your roommate(s) are. After being given the name of my dorm ("Yes! Mary Donlon! The social one!") and roommate, I rushed to my newly created Facebook account to find out all I could about the people I would be living with, forming close friendships and celebrating all the freshmen rites of passage Cornell had to offer. After being slightly disappointed that my new roommate didn't have a Facebook, I e-mailed her from my new net I.D. a message with a lot of words like "excited" "ohmygod" and tons of exclamation points.
The response I got back was as equally enthusiastic and soon our interaction progressed to instant messanger. I was determined to make a good impression on my soon-to-be roommate. We had a lot in common together: we were both from neighboring towns in Long Island, considered Judaism a big part of our lives, applied to Cornell early, and liked the same types of music and movies. Through our instant messaging conversations, I inferred that she was funny (when I told her of my weird sleeping patterns she teased me and called me a vampire), was close to her family (I messaged her and ended up talking to her mother who was using her screen name), very smart (we talked about the upcoming AP tests we were taking), and friendly (she asked questions about my life, and seemed very open about answering my questions about hers). Soon enough, she created a Facebook profile and posted her prom pictures. My impressions were that she was very tall, athletic (she listed many sports and her job as a lifeguard under her interests), well liked (she made many Facebook friends and received a lot of wallposts her first couple of days of joining Facebook) and outgoing (she seemed to have many friends with her in her prom pictures and always messaged me first when we were online).
The Hyperpersonal model played a big role in how I perceived my perspective roommate. Using her perceived height from her photos, and listed interests on Facebook, I attributed her to be very athletic, levelheaded, active, and cool. In addition, her sense of humor and friendliness on instant messanger made me believe she was equally personable and worth having as a good friend. This was due to selective self presentation via Facebook on her part, as well as the over-attribution process on my part. The fact that her mother occasionally went on her messanger account allowed me to overgeneralize that she was very much close and played an active role in her family. Due to all these positive attributions, I was very intimidated to meet her and hoped she would also like me and want to be good friends. Suffice to say, my perception of her was inflated.
When we left virtuality and met face to face, the impression I got was quite different. Since there was less control over the information and manner in which it was shared, I got quite a different perception. I was shocked to meet a short (about my height, 5'2"), meek and quiet girl. I remember being so surprised at how high her voice was. The first few days in our room were awkward, quiet and tense between us as the flowing conversations we had online did not occur face to face. As I got to know her more, I found that she was quite neurotic, messy, procrastinated, and prone to hysterical outbursts. She was nothing like the polished, cool, outgoing person I had pictured when we interacted over the Internet.
As Ramirez and Wang (in press) point out, my experience with my freshman roommate constituted part of an EVT, or Expectancy Violation Theory. The expectancy violation, or "behavior that deviates from or is inconsistent with currently held expectations" occurred when my roommate's behavior was inconsistent with my positive expectations of her. These violations led to my evaluation and interpretation of the valance of the violations, which influenced future interactions between us. I would say our CMC interaction was relatively long term (over the span of 4 months), and yet contained many violations when we met face-to-face, consistent with Ramirez and Wang's findings. As in the study, since we had a long term interaction, I was more likely to rate my partner's behavior more negatively (which I did) than if we had talked in the short term. In addition, I would be more likely to have a higher degree of uncertainty FtF following a long term CMC interaction than if I had talked to her for a short amount of time.
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