I frequently visit various online news websites such as drudgereport.com and politico.com. These websites all link to articles with topics ranging from politics and finance to celebrity gossip and sex. Within these articles is a comments section for anyone to pass judgment on the article itself or on a situation/topic which the article may bring up. The article which I read was a controversial piece entitled, Clinton Vows to End War.
The comments section is asynchronous, anonymous, and fairly persistent. I say “fairly” because this dimension of psychological space is persistent, yet only as long as the news remains “todays” news. Once a breaking story hits the website, the comments on the old news dwindle. I also observed the effect asynchronous dialogue has on the “conversation.” For example, a controversial post was made followed by several unrelated posts and then a day later a second post was made as a follow up to the first controversial post. This caused a great deal of confusion. The result was a fight and name-calling. User “slickbgone” posted right after the controversial post was made and despite his/her comment being unrelated, the comment was interpreted incorrectly.
I decided to use the flame war between ‘slickbgone’ and several of the other users, such as “WI Cynic,” “Northern Dog,” and “Strike3” to take a closer look at impression formation. At no point in the comments did anyone deviate from referring to one another as anything but their username until the flame war came about. At this point, users began making assumptions. For no reason at all, slickbgone took on a female identity (perhaps because she sided with Hillary Clinton). Slickbgone began calling several of the users “he,” perhaps because he/she felt like men are more likely to fight. Furthermore, personalities which seemed already cold got even colder. In terms of several of the big 5 traits, all users were very open, not at all conscientious of each other, and had no care for agreeableness. This is could all be due to the anonymous nature of this CMC.
The flame war which arose as a result of the confusion follows the ideas set out in the Social Information Processing theory explored by Joe Walther in 1993. Due to a lack of FTF there was a delay and disruption within the chain of communication. The SIP theory explains that nonverbal cues are not totally missing, just delayed and must be fed through a different channel. In the comments section, there was a delay without any nonverbal cues to explain the confusion. This elapsed time caused the flame war to arise and aided in users online impression formation. Clearly, CMC can lead to conflicts which would otherwise be avoided in FTF communication.
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2 comments:
I thought the environment you chose to look at was really original and very interesting. It just shows that the lack of any real vocal cues can lead to a completely unnecessary misunderstanding and it was amazing to see how people assumed things strictly based on names. This also shows a part of the hyperpersonal model, the over-attribution process, where people don’t have the full details so they fill in based on their imaginations. There was no indication regarding the gender of these people, yet they still assumed the sex of one another due to just a few cues. I am also curious about what your impression of these people was after reading their posts. Was there any strong impression or did the CMC prevent this from happening?
Comments on the Internet are its biggest blessing as well as its biggest curse. I personally love internet comments and often open blog posts or articles just to see what how other people reacted to it. Of all online comment spaces however, YouTube is easily my favorite. For almost every video you will find a handful of positive comments and then a mother lode of the most vulgar flame wars you have ever seen. In my experience the process goes like this:
1. One person is ridiculed for making an inane or miseducated comment, an inevitability on the Internet
2. Another person calls them out on it, shielded by the anonymity of CMC
3. The original person retaliates with an overly offensive remark that now draws in other people who will take sides.
4. Any thread of intelligence that once existed in the comments is now lost in the oblivion of racist and distasteful comments
The most interesting thing about your experience is that because people did not have normal factors to draw their insults and arguments with, they looked to the few identifying traits such as their screennames. Often spelling errors or typos will also lead to one person being stereotyped as either stupid or 12 years old. I would be curious to see if you could use a certain screenname to provoke and predict specific types of responses if you were to engage in flame wars.
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