For someone who is only 19 years old, I have been presented with countless opportunities to form and maintain long-distance relationships. This is because my mom has forced me to attend so many summer camps all over Massachusetts (she still claims she did it “because she loves me”…right). I have been to basketball camp, softball camp, and my FAVORITE…God camp. At each camp, I wasted a week of my life with weird strangers and over-perky counselors. Thanks, mom.
Now, for those of you who have not experienced these places of hell, let me introduce you to a completely new world. It goes a little something like this:
It all starts when your mom or dad wakes up one day and decides, “I think I’m going to make insert your name here miserable for a week. I’m going to send him/her to softball/God/sewing camp”. Your fate is sealed from that moment on, and you are doomed. The worst is when you finally arrive at camp and you realize that you are roomed with some psycho with a cat obsession. It is going to be a super week.
The camp week always passes as slow as humanly possible, and you make “friends” in the meantime. When everyone is ready to depart, there is a frantic exchange of email addresses, screenames, and sometimes phone numbers.
When you get home, you immediately add all of your little camp pals to your buddy list, and recognize that giving away your screename was the biggest mistake of your life. For some reason, the people who now have your screename think it’s kosher to IM you every day. Patricia Wallace had this same problem when she went to summer camp and hypothesized why people feel the need to do this.
She said that these camp friends/stalkers might think that they have common ground with you because you were both at the same camp. Common ground means that you share similar beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions with someone. As well as going to the same camp, your camp roomie may feel a connection with you because she really likes cats and, hey!, your grandma has cat-print pants! If that’s not common ground, I don’t know what is.
Wallace also stated that increased physical proximity at camp might have caused their obsession with you. Now that you are not near them anymore, they feel as if they must remain close (emotionally) through instant messenger. You just wish they would stop.
Maybe if you ignore cat-girl she’ll get the hint? Let us hope so.
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2 comments:
I think you put a really interesting spin on Wallace’s attraction factors in your blog post since the feelings weren’t necessarily mutual. I’ve had a similar camp experience and actually resulted in me getting a new screenname. I think that the face to face interactions that occur at a themed camp really do help to exaggerate Wallace’s principal of common ground because you’re only learning a certain aspect about those individuals. This brings up the Law of Attraction because these camps are actually a lot like online spaces because you’re only learning certain aspects about those individuals due to the way the camp is structured. This is very similar to the Hyperpersonal effect because less information is perceived as more. I think it’s really interesting to see how that common ground carried over from the camp to the online space.
Really interesting post…Though we had very different camp experiences, I too experienced something very similar in regard to the rush to add buddies, speak to them everyday, and remain in touch for various reasons. In my experience, everyone speaks everyday for several weeks. And almost always, after these several weeks the conversations die down. I would attribute this to proximity and common ground, as you did. Similar to what Mike said in his comment, I would be curious to know how much of an effect common ground had in both of our experiences. Did we really know these kids and share so much with them? Or was it perceived this way because we were forced into living conditions, teams, etc with them? Your humor throughout the post made it easy to read and follow what you were saying. If only Wallace’s theories truly were based on such trivial experiences such as sleep away camp nightmares, haha.
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