#5 Option1: Although I have not seen him in real world yet, I can say he is a good friend of mine

About five years ago, I once enjoyed talking to random people online. ‘buddybuddy.com’ was Korean website that I usually went to meet new people. In buddybuddy.com, there were hundreds of chatrooms, forums and online communities. Buddybuddy.com also had its own instant messenger program, so if you made friends there, you could add them on your messenger program and talk to them if they were online. This is when I met a guy named hwang912. On that day, among the chatrooms categorized by age, I went to the one for teens. Inside the chatroom, there were about four people talking. hwang912 was one of them. As usual, all of us told our asl. hwang912 was a year older than me, living in Korea. In our conversation online, two of Wallace’s attraction factors played a major role: common ground and proximity.

Common ground means mutually shared beliefs, assumptions and propositions. This can be divided into conversational and categorical common ground. As a result of common ground, people find others more attractive as they share more common grounds.(Lecture Slide) As we kept talking we found out that we had common interest in old Korean pops. In our first conversation, we already had three things in common: nationality, age and interest in old pop songs. These categorical common grounds made it much easier for us to connect to each other and to continue our conversation. I remember we spent almost five hours in our first conversation. At the end, we gave each other email address and nickname for the instant messenger.

After the first talk is when proximity started playing a major role in developing this relationship. “Familiarity breeds attraction” shows how proximity takes place in relationship and interpersonal attraction very well. As friendly as person A becomes to person B, B finds A more attractive and desires to continue or even strengthen the relationship with A. In online spaces, proximity is measured differently from FtF. Online familiarity flows from intersection frequency. (Lecture Slide) After the first conversation, we kept talking on the instant messenger and sending emails to each other. At first, we talked almost every day. Because of a fourteen-hour difference between Seoul and New York time, hwang912 usually stayed up late and I got up early to talk. Although at first I did not know him that well, as we kept talking I was able to find out what he likes to do in his free time, what kind of personality he has, what kind of family he has, what he has planned to do in his future and other various things about him. At the same time, high frequency of our conversation allowed me to express about myself as well. I told him about my personality, hobbies, concerns, school, etc. after about a month or so, I was able to tell what kind of person he is. As Social Information Processing(SIP) Theory says, although only text-based relationship seemed to slow down exchange of social information, over time the relationship we developed online was not particularly weak. Moreover, since this relationship was only text-based, both of us were able to solely concentrate on verbal information to form an impression of the other. Supported by SIP, proximity let both of us find each other more attractive and eventually strengthened out relationship. Although I have not seen him in real world yet, I can say he is a good friend of mine.