Wikipedia is an especially interesting online space because not only is every user’s actions, edits and comments visible to anybody, every past action is kept in its history. In this assignment I chose the user Check-Six as my target. I observed his user page, article contributions as well as discussions with other users for the last year. Creepy huh? While I did not have any direct interaction with the user I can make quite a few assumptions about his interests, personality, and demographics. My preconceptions of the Wikipedia community are that the average Wikipedian has a higher probability of being a white male, being technically inclined (dorky), having access to a computer, and having too much time on their hands.
A Wikipedia user page naturally has many more cues than other text based online spaces like blogs, or forums but still conveys its information through text and is drastically different from a user page in another social network like Facebook. Check-Six has chosen to include a great deal of information about himself in his About Me section and his userboxes (self identifying boxes). What was initially surprising was the sheer amount of information given about himself on his user page; he is well educated, lives in San Francisco, speaks English and Chinese, has published a book on airplanes, likes guns and is a Star Wars geek. When compared to other social networks or Ftf interactions, Wikipedia users are still 1. Hidden behind a text only profile 2. Aren’t explicitly linked to other users through friend or school networks. This is probably why users are comfortable sharing more information than they normally would in Ftf or on other social networks.
From his contributions to talk pages, he obviously knows a lot about certain subjects but he occasionally mixes up phrases (for example he said pick nit instead of nitpick) which immediately shifted my perspective of a well educated person to an immigrant who has learned English as a second language.
My impression of Check-Six is still very impersonal even though I know could list more facts about him than anybody I would meet in a normal Ftf interaction over a few days. It is like I have exhausted any verbal and interpersonal probes about Check-Six but am clueless about non verbal, vocal and situational characteristics. I feel that my impression fit closely with CFO predictions. There was definitely decreased social presence even when compared to Facebook just because I couldn’t associate a face or personality to a genderless username. I ended up relying on verbal cues to deduce non verbal factors.
4 comments:
Your post really stood out to me because you chose to get to know someone through an asynchronous space that involved no form of feedback or contact with the person you were trying to get to know. It is so easy to form impressions of someone just by looking at their facebook or myspace account without actually contacting the person!
You make a great point regarding the formatting difference between something like wikipedia and Facebook. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words and who knows how your impression might have changed if a single picture was posted of Check-Six.
One of the issues that the professor pointed out with the Social Presence theory was that it is in essence difficult to "define" exactly what social presence is. But with your post, it got me thinking: to what degree is "social presence" affected by synchronicity?
Also, do you think your impressions of check six were more "cold" than they would have been if you could have chatted with the real live person?
Great job.
I decided to read and comment on this post because a) I think Wikipedia is a very interesting online space with a lot of aspects worth studying and b) Wikipedia is a vastly different type of way to interact and form an online impression. My instincts were right in that this post proved to be very interesting. I was most interested with your preconceived notions of a wikipedian and how your impression matched those notions. It showed me that not only is the information one posts about themselves or the direct communication with a user important, but even the website which the user is on can be a huge factor of impression formation. For example, the people who went into a random chat room frequently imagined themselves stumbling upon an uneducated, overly sexual 30-40 year old male. On the other hand, on a site like Wikipedia, or what my blog was about, an online news website, our notions of who we would encounter were vastly different.
Your blog really seemed to catch my eye, the topic you decided to explore, Wikipedia, was a novel idea and extraordinarily fascinating. It is definitely a psychological space on-line where you can get to know a wide array of people and quite a bit of detail about them. I find it interesting how just one word phrase could change your entire perception of a person. I found your example of ‘pick-nit’ instead of ‘nitpick’ rather intriguing because this one slip up of word arrangement shifted your impression of the person so dramatically (smart, educated to a an immigrant who learned English as a second language). Its interesting how something so small could allow you to form such a different impression of the person. Afterall, it could have just been a harmless mistake, aren’t we all guilty of making a grammatical mistake at some point? Unfortunately, on the internet, we have to be far more careful in what and how we say things because people definitely read more into what we have to say when its written versus when its is spoken. On-line there is definitely a lack of verbal cues to aid in our impression formation, which can lead to some very false conclusions.
You did a great job in explaining how your impression of Check-Six fits a CFO impression. I would have been very surprised if you formed a connection with him simply from reading his profile page. From the information that you relayed about Check-Six, I actually found that I could form a picture in my head of how Check-Six might look and act. Needless to say, my impressions were very stereotypical and unflattering, which brings in a little bit of the SIDE theory as well.
I also liked that you used Wikipedia for this assignment instead of a chat room; you set yourself apart by doing so. Wikipedia is an unusual space in that many users have the power to edit one site that serves the public. You did a solid job of explaining the unique aspects of Wikipedia and explaining how it differs from other websites.
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