First, finding chat rooms. It seems like they are starting to fall out of favor because MSN chats apparently closed, Yahoo chats are hard to find and so on. I ended up finding ICQ chats which let me join chat rooms through an online interface.
This is when I encountered my next problem. Most of the chat talk is about sex. People looking to private chat and discuss relationships. Clearly, this would not work for the assignment. I checked many different rooms: teens, 20's, 30's, 40's, computers, science fiction, etc. and all were talking about the same thing.
So, then I changed my name to "nosexjustlife" and joined the 20's chatroom. I openly said that I am 20, male, from NY and would like to have a decent conversation with somebody that is not just sex.
One of the responses ended up being a ~1 hour long conversation with a girl from Nebraska. This actually turned into something very nice and I made a new friend!
At first the conversation was kind of cold. I've never done "chat rooms" so I did not know what to say, and the questions we asked each other were stupid. However, after a few minutes we found that we both liked poetry and then the conversation took off. I started finding out a lot more things about her. My impressions after an hour of talking - she is a quiet, but emotional girl and expresses herself through poems and other forms of art. She is going through some rough times and feels kind of lost. She likes most forms of art and can be "dark" or "light" depending on the mood. As a description, she was a girl, 18 and white. Overall I would say her personality was warm.
We eventually talked about colleges, movies, art and a lot more.
The funny thing is right now I feel like I have a very good impression of her. If I met her on the street I would know how to talk to her even though I don't know how she carries herself in RL.
I think my experience fits very well with the Hyperpersonal Model. I can basically go down the list and check off every single attribute. I got a very good - warm impression of her and might actually end up being good friends with her. I see her as an Art person because of a few lines of our conversation. And of course that one statement that she liked art carried through the whole conversation so Overattribution processes and selective self preservation took place. Reallocation of resources definitely happened as we got into some lengthy discussions that are easier to do online. Finally, I tried to be a friendly guy who enjoys poetry and movies. She probably tried to be an art person from the get-go. So, behavioral confirmation also took place.
Overall, this was a lot of fun and I think I actually made my first online-only friend.
2 comments:
Hey Aleksandr! I also had a similar thing happen to me when I went to do this assignment. It seemed to take me forever to find a clean and friendly conversation after entering a chat room. I finally found a 18 year old male from Indiana. We actually hit it off real well, and I'll probably chat with him in the future. The SIP theory really IS true, after all. Things that would have taken 5 minutes to say in real life to my new friend ended up being an intriguing hour-long conversation!
Aleksander, I definitely understand your frustration with searching for a conversation revolving around non-sexual topics as well. I began searching chat rooms myself at the beginning of the assignment, and I soon became frustrated myself by the lack of topics, so I decided to change my topic completely to an online game. Yet I am happy that you were able to successfully find a conversation a make a new friend. In addition, it is good to see that the conversation changed from the initial cold nature to a warm environment. If it had not, you might have used the CFO theory by making a negative, underdeveloped opinion of this person. Yet because the conversation got rolling and you two were able to get along on better terms, you were able to successfully identify the hyperpersonal model. Without continuing the conversation, you could not have eventually gained a warmer opinion of this person, so I complement you on your patience.
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