#5, Option 1: More CMC, Less Communication

Due to an enjoyable and thoroughly productive summer as friends and business partners, my Californian friend and I sought for ways to remain connected (note: this was only a two-month-old friendship). We decided to use Skype, the VOIP application, and a program/widget with chat functionality (Gmail Quick Contacts has been a nice simple chat function).

I knew that any type of mediated communication we used would lack the vital non-verbal (specifically, somatic) and immediate verbal cues exchanged while talking face-to-face. Further, it is much harder to brainstorm and bounce ideas and thoughts around when exchanging information becomes a more asynchronous and cumbersome act. Both of these have become issues between my friend and me. The expedient non-verbal cues used in quick, fiery conversations are absent, and with them, some of the motivation to attempt such conversations at all.

Proximity—familiarity between parties that arrives with frequent intersection—has not really been an issue, as we intersect through various media fairly regularly. The topical and length components of our conversations, however, have changed. Even though we share common ground—Clark’s concept that mutually shared beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions lead to mutual attraction—we are actually more inhibited when a conversation allowed for personal and sensitive business issues to be exchanged. Disinhibition, as I understand Wallace to have defined it, is a theoretical component best modeled after “stranger on a train” relationships, and not those initially developed in a medium with more non-verbal cues available. I suppose we weren’t comfortable sharing and talking extensively about certain issues in a mediated interaction that we once had shared FtF, because the feedback cues previously relied upon were absent (e.g. immediate tonal cues, non-verbal cues). To give a parallel, one would not break up with his girlfriend over the phone – personal and intimate issues, once exchanged heavily in one modality, are not easily adapted to another mode (especially one with less cues).

Our CMCs contradict or supersede identification with McKenna’s Relationship Facilitation Factors. Gating Features are obviated by our CMCs, and the whole “assessment” component detailed in “Connecting to Similar Others” has been flipped on its head in our case: rather than developing a relationship from less cues and gradually including more, we are going backwards. The goal of our relationship is heading against the current assumed by McKenna’s Factors. As of my current understanding, many CMC relationship theories fail to accommodate for FtF-originating relationships that are maintained via CMC. But what an interesting concept? Perhaps in my friend and I were romantically involved, more of Wallace’s and McKenna’s factors could apply as we fantasized or became sentimental. But this is not the case here. The range of cues offered by our means of communication, partially because it is more pragmatic than romantic, has not strengthened our relationship (and may have injured it).