#5, Option 1...an internet relationship turned "real"

Back when I was a timid sophomore in high school, I had a friend in a band (Mike) who invited me to one of his band's concerts. Mike and I had been going to school together for quite a few years and we knew each other pretty well, but his other bandmates went to our rival high school, and I did not know them at all. So a few of my friends and I went to their show and took a mental note of how adorable the lead singer was (naturally), so the next day, in true high school fashion, my friends and I tracked down what we thought to be his AIM screen name and started talking to him online. However, at the beginning of the conversation, we discovered that who we had contacted wasn't actually the lead singer, but was the drummer (who I didn't remember very well since I was so smitten by the lead singer). But regardless of the fact that he wasn't my first choice, the drummer and I kept talking, and we actually found out that we had a lot in common: we liked similar music, we had some friends in common, we had the same taste in movies, and we had a very similar sense of humor.

So the drummer, Tim, and I got to talking on AIM very often, up to a couple hours a day, and this went on for a few weeks I'd say (in the pre-facebook era), before we actually met face-to-face (FtF). After this initial meeting we started hanging out a lot and have actually been dating for almost 5 years since then. Our relationship first got started with our talking in a Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) setting, and since then we have had a lot of instances where our relationship has relied on various forms of mediated communication, simply because he is a year ahead of me in school, we go to different schools, and he studied abroad in Italy last semester, so there has been quite a bit of interacting via AIM, e-mail, facebook, and of course the telephone. While our entire relationship has at times relied on various forms of mediated communication, I feel that our initial CMC interactions are the most important to discuss because they really formed the basis of our relationship and functioned in a way that was more significant and interesting than mere necessity, and therefore the attraction and relationship facilitation factors were more important in these initial mediated encounters.

In reflecting on my particular experiences, I feel like all of Wallace's attraction factors played a major role in the early development of our relationship, and that these factors hit home with me more than McKenna's relationship facilitation factors, perhaps simply because our initial CMC interactions happened before we knew anything about each other, before we read or posted on blogs or had any form of website or online social networks. So while all of Wallace's attraction factors apply to my experiences, I will discuss the factors of proximity and disinhibition. According to Wallace, the idea of proximity means that in an online environment (as with FtF environments), familiarity breeds fondness, comfort, and attraction, but that since this can't mean physical proximity in online interactions, intersection frequency is what breeds familiarity, meaning that the more often you "intersect" with someone online, the more attracted you are to them because they become more familiar to you. The proximity factor had a large impact on my initial relationship with Tim because by that time in the AIM environment, Tim and I (and all of our friends) were chatting online for hours after school, and even when we weren't on chatting, we were still signed on with an away message, so that people could leave us messages. This allowed for us to intersect in an online environment quite frequently, allowed us to talk at a much higher frequency (for multiple hours per day) than would have been possible in a FtF environment, and so we became very familiar with each other very quickly and therefore became attracted to each other and comfortable with each other very quickly.

Second, the disinhibition effects of the online environment played a large role and went hand in hand with the proximity factor in the development of our relationship. According to Wallace, due to the anonymity of the online environment, we are less inhibited in our interactions, and self-disclosure becomes more important to us because of the reduced cues in the online setting. The Hyperpersonal processes also come into play here, as the portions of ourself that we choose to disclose to the other become intensified. This factor played an important role in the development of our relationship because due to the lack of other cues (such as nonverbal cues) that exist in FtF interactions, we were forced to self-disclose things about ourselves to each other online in order for the relationship to develop. While this did lead to an intensification of the information we received, it was not in a strictly negative Cues-Filtered-Out way, but rather in the Hyperpersonal sense that while initially there was a forced intensification due to the lack of cues, over time, the more we were forced to self-disclose, the more we learned about each other. This also interacted with the proximity factor, in that the more were intersected in the online environment, the more familiar and attracted we became to one another, and the less inhibited we were with self-disclosing information about ourselves, and the more we ended up learning about each other. So although some people have the view that the development of a relationship online would be less legitimate than a relationship that gets its start in FtF interactions, our initial CMC interactions really allowed us to get to know each other more intensely and at a faster pace because we were more forced to disclose information about ourselves (because that was the only way we could get to know each other), and also because we were able to intersect and therefore become familiar with each other and attracted to each other at a much faster pace than we would have been able to do in strictly FtF encounters.

Comments:

http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/as-college-students-we-can-all-identify.html

http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/51-this-blog-post-is-group-therapy.html