Assignment 11 -- Actually, you're weird.

I remember a situation where a couple of female friends of mine were going on a double date – one girl was paired with her boyfriend, the other was being set up with his friend (a blind date). Both boys lived a little out of town, and neither went to school with all of us. “Mari” had been chatting online with “Jeff” before this first blind date. It seemed like they had really hit it off. In fact, she spoke of him all the time, and whenever I happened to be at her house, they were chatting on AIM. Over time, Mari’s impressions of Jeff were highly consistent with the Hyperpersonal model. She took the little information she had and developed strong over-attributions. They both enjoyed sports, had similar taste in music, etc. Within a few weeks she anticipated their first date leading to a romantic relationship. They spent a lot of time chatting late into the night, and expressed a lot of affection for each other.

Unfortunately, their date (a modality switch) was consistent with results discussed by Ramirez and Wang – after a long-term interaction in virtual reality, a Ftf interaction was sorely disappointing. Mari had built high expectations for their meeting, but consistent with Expectancy Violation Theory and Ramirez and Wang’s study, the experience did not meet expectations, increased uncertainty, and was quite negatively evaluated. Awkward would be an understatement, and Mari and Jeff actually never spoke again. She later confided to me that he was strange, boring, unattractive, and… well, you get the idea. This particular memory stands out significantly to me because of how extreme it was. It is also interesting how in line this specific event was with Ramirez and Wang’s theory. Maybe the situation would have panned out differently if they hadn’t chatted for so long beforehand – like the study also suggests. Regardless, the longer period of interaction via CMC enabled them to develop Hyperpersonal impressions, and subsequently, a modality switch to Ftf was a complete disaster. Ninth grade can be so hard sometimes.

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Assignment #11: Relationships that leave virtuality

It's true that many people do form relationships online and then choose to move their friendship and/or romance offline into reality. Seeing that I don't personally know any couple that met online and continued their relationship in reality, I'm going to analyze the commercials for eharmony.com and match.com.

Both of these sites offer members the chance to create profiles that can be seen by other members. Each person can compare themselves with others who they feel they have the potential to really connect with through similar interests and backgrounds. When it comes to CMC, the Hyperpersonal Model can be applied because people rate others on fewer characteristics (because people choose what specific information to disclose on the internet profiles) and these ratings are therefore more intensified and exaggerated. The Hyperpersonal Model is composed of over-attribution processes, developmental aspects, selective self-presentation, re-allocation of cognitive resources and behavioral confirmation.

Because people only list selective information on their profiles, the information they share is managed. Even though, sites like eHarmony and match.com say that the information shared is enough to form a strong bond. The couples on the commercials stand to prove this, saying that they never believed they could find such love online (many met through the sites and moved on to marrying in real life).

Personally, I don't think I would make an account on such sites in hopes of finding my soulmate, but some of my friends have made profiles for fun just to see what the experience is all about. I believe that connections through CMC and dating sites can lead to lasting relationships, but such are few and far between.

Assignment # 11: Mr. Bad Guy is actually Mr. Nice Guy

One relationship that started online and left virtuality was the relationship I have with my boss from my summer internship. I saw a posting for the summer intern position on a Cornell website. So I emailed the contact person who was the director of the program, in order to ask about more information on applying for the position. For months he did not respond to me email. I assumed the position had been already filled. Months later, I decided to email him again. He finally replied with a very short and concise email asking me to send my resume to him. I did so. A couple of weeks later I got a call from someone asking to set up a time for an interview. When it came time for the interview I was very nervous. Because all of the emails that the director of the program sent to me were so short, concise, and not very friendly, I felt that he would be that same way in person, and that my interview might be more challenging than others. He also took a long time to respond which made me feel that he was not very interested in me as an applicant. I was very happily surprised however when I finally met him. Right away I could tell he was an extremely friendly person. He seemed genuinely interested in everything I said during the interview. He smiled a lot and made me feel very comfortable. This was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

This outcome can be discussed along the lines of the Hyperpersonal Model. My thoughts about the program director were definitely exaggerated. I ascribed characteristics to him based on the little I knew about him through the emails he sent. I expected him to be concise and unfriendly because that’s how his emails were. However after my first meeting with my boss I realized he was very friendly and one of the warmest people I ever met. There was definitely an expectancy violation. My expectation for the FtF interaction was negative but actually ended up being very positive. Because of this expectancy violation there was an enhancement affect. Instead of being disappointed like some theories predict, my views of my boss were actually enhanced and became positive.

This assignment helped me realize how much we exaggerate online interactions and how these exaggerations affect our expectations for FtF meetings. If someone sends me a friendly email, I automatically think that when I meet them in person they will be friendly. Through the hyperpersonal model you can see that whether or not there is an expectancy violation determines what kind of effect you will have in person; either enhancement, like in my situation, or it could even be extreme disappointment in other situations.

#11: Mr Perfect is actually Mr Awkward

 It is easy for someone to be cool, witty, and even charming when in an
online chat box. But once you leave virtuality, the person you meet FtF
could be different than you ever imagined! When I was a senior in
highschool, my friend Becca, who lived in another state, had a family
friend’s son who had also been accepted to Cornell; for the purposes of
this blog I will call him Bob. She gave him my screen name and we began
talking regularly, thinking that once we got to Cornell we could be good
friends. After a while of talking we realized we had a lot in common, and
developed stronger feelings for one another. We decided to start a
relationship when we got to school, and in the meantime invited one
another to our senior proms. When I went up to visit Bob for his prom,
however, the funny, confident, and flirty boy I expected to meet up with
was, in reality, boring, uptight, and not very witty.  He was too shy to
hold my hand, he really was not that funny, and when we went out to dinner
we barely had anything to talk about. It was strange that this person, who
I had laughed with and joked with so much online, was suddenly completely
the opposite of how he presented himself to me. It is understandable for
things to have been awkward at first, since we were probably both nervous
to be spending a few days together for the first time FtF, but this
experience was beyond awkward, it was just terrible.
        I think a lot of the reason this experience was so disappointing can be
explained by the Ramirez & Wang article, and to an extent, the
Uncertainty Reduction Theory. This theory states that the more time
people spend talking to one another online, the more information they
gather and there is an increase in intimacy and liking. Bob and I had
gotten to know each other really well online. We had developed lots of
inside jokes and even shared personal stories, helped each other with
problems, and shared secrets. We spoke for a few hours every single day
for weeks and developed a strong liking for one another. URT predicts
that a positive outcome will occur when leaving virtuality. As I already
explained, the opposite happened and I realized that Bob was nothing like
I expected. As explained in the Ramirez & Wang article, the hyperpersonal
perspective explains why things did not work out when Bob and I met in
person. When speaking with Bob online I overanalyzed and over attributed
the limited cues he had given. This led me to develop “heightened
impressions and idealized partner expectation.” When he had made witty
remarks or jokes (that he probably had time to think about), I came to
the conclusion that he was hilarious. When I met him in person we barely
joked around together at all. Based on the comments he said online, I
figured he was a very confident and outgoing person, when in reality he
was very shy and my whole visit was awkward.  As a result, I feel like I
have personal experience to support the paper’s hypothesis that “MS
following a long-term association via CMC will provide social information
that will be evaluated more negatively and uncertainty-provoking relative
to interacting via CMC.”  I had formed such a high opinion of Bob after
talking to him online for months, that when I went up to visit him for
prom I viewed the situation and interaction very negatively. As my
“uncertainty” was reduced I viewed him in a negative light and realized
he was not the boy I had imagined him to be. 
  Needless to say I found a
new prom date for my own prom, and to this day give advice to friends
that if they ever have a crush on someone who seems “so perfect” online
or on facebook...they may want to spend a few hours with Mr. Perfect to
see if he really is as charming as they perceive.

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My Mom Always Told Me Looks Can Decieve...(11)

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.

Assignment 11: All that, for this?

Since I use the Internet frequently, it is quite common for me to interact with strangers online, whether it’s a common interest site or a discussion debate. Now, especially with Facebook, it becomes much easier to communicate with people online, even those you don’t know. Most of the time though, this CMC interaction rarely leads to a FtF meeting, at least for me.

However, there was one instance where I actually met someone FtF after interacting with him for several months through Facebook. It was actually quite sketchy, now that I look back on it. This person apparently read a comment I wrote on some group wall, looked me up, messaged me and then to top it off, he got my AIM too. Needless to say, he IMed me soon after and we began to chat regularly. Thanks to Facebook, I found out he was a friend of a friend and according to our profiles, we actually had some things in common. Our chat topics normally consisted of sports teams (since we came from a similar area), our mutual friends, classes, etc. He was extremely sarcastic and loved to talk about how awesome he was. Maybe it was due to my naïveté as a freshman, but pretty soon I believed everything that showed up in our IM windows. Our interactions definitely followed the Hyperpersonal Model. The cues were very limited; I basically knew that he loved to drink, partied frequently, had numerous friends, hated Ithaca and was in love with himself. The fact that he was so sarcastic and insulted everything led me to conclude that maybe he was as cool as he appeared online. That was all I knew of him and gradually I became more intimidated, especially when he suggested we meet in person. Finally, after months of persuasion, I finally agreed to see him in a public place. Now I know that there was definitely some selective self-presentation going on, as well as over-attribution of resources. The fact that he had my Facebook profile available to him meant that he had the goods and could edit how he communicated with me.

Our meeting, like the Ramirez and Wang paper stated, was definitely a “turning point” in our relationship. The person did not meet my expectations at all, which agreed with the Expectation Violation Theory. He was rude, awkward and just plain weird. The FtF meeting, after our CMC interactions, was disappointing and led to a chain of events which basically ended up with no (or rare) future interactions. The research was correct in that the impressions I made through CMC failed to match physical reality during FtF, and there was a huge difference in my initial expectations of the person’s “communication behavior and physical appearance” and what was present during the FtF encounter. Thankfully, I learned to be not so naïve and trusting.

11 - a good friend?

I knew my good friend Amy through mutual friends; we never met in FtF. We talked for almost a year before meeting in FtF. I needed a place to stay for a week in NYC, and she offered her place. At first my impressions were more negative, but along the course of the week, my impressions became more positive. I adjusted to her “true” personality and understood her more.

My relationship with Amy is best explained by the Social Information Processing Model. It took time for me to get a good impression of who she was.

Factors that affected our relationship were proximity, common ground, and removal of gating features. We have high intersection frequency being on AIM frequently. We had a strong common ground being in the same organizations and sharing friends. Through CMC, we had a huge proportion of similarities. We had high self-disclosure because we did not know each other. In this sense removal of gating features was present because we did not judge each other.

The Gibbs article supports three hypotheses based on the SIP model which were true for me as well. Amy and I held importance on a long term relationship resulting in more honest, more frequent, and more intentional self-disclosure, though not necessarily more positive.

Ramirez and Wang state in their article that modality switching allows access to new social information, filling blanks left by CMC impression formation, “enhance partner perceptions, and further relationship growth.” This is in accordance to my own experience. I did not have a complete impression of Amy, but meeting her in FtF definitely solidified it. Ramirez and Wang also state that “impressions formed through extended period of CMC typically fail to match the physical reality experienced” which was also the case for me. I found Amy to be more sarcastic and less open. This in turn follows what Ramirez and Wang state that “modality switching (MS) diminishes communication processes and social outcomes” when FtF doesn’t meet CMC expectations. This was true for an initial time span. The Expectancy Violation Theory also held for our situation because I expected Amy to be less sarcastic and more open which was inconsistent with my FtF impression. Over time, a chain of events, which involved more discussion, explained the difference in my impression of her. Meeting Amy was definitely a “turning point”, as Ramirez and Wang state, in our relationship. It solidified the strength of our relationship.