11: Remember that best friend...well she is no more

As I have mentioned before , I met one of my best friends through a blogging site known as Xanga(Me and my best friend). We “met” online in June, 2001. The interaction started off slow, but escalated soon after a severe emotional event occurred in my real life (December 2002). Monica and I got closer to the point of being best friends talking through the phone, IM, and of course through Xanga posts. We talked about everything under the sun and not a day would go by without one of us calling or IM’ing each other.

Our first real-world interaction came about a year after getting close to each other. She came to New York to visit. It was awkward at first but soon enough that disappeared and we were us again. Almost all those who interacted with us that weekend were shocked to know that this was the first time we had officially “met”. We had three more real-world interactions within a period of two years. However, in December of 2005, we had a huge fight and our friendship ceased to exist.

Approximately 4 months later, we patched things up. Since our last real world meeting (April 2005), I had not seen Monica till this past weekend. Since it had been so long since we had seen each other, and we had both changed so much, it was almost like it was our first meeting again. However, unlike our first meeting, this one did not go as well as planned. Expectations on both sides were not met, and it resulted in a very awkward weekend, and a tearful phone call where we both realized that maybe we had just thought that our friendship was the same when it truly wasn’t and hadn’t been for a long time.

My relationship with Monica has grown and developed over time, allowing different portions of it to be analyzed by different theories. I choose to analyze the last part of our relationship.

According to Ramirez and Wang’s article, their hypothesis 3 stated “MS following a long-term association via CMC will provide social information that will be (a) evaluated more negatively and (b) uncertainty provoking relative to interacting via CMC” (12). This hypothesis was proven true in their study and is also proven true in my situation as described above.

My approximately two and a half year online interaction (April 2005-November 2007) with Monica can be taken as a long-term online association. Since the interaction was long term, there was a higher rate of over-attribution and many more expectations when the relationship left virtuality. When Monica and I met this past weekend, we both had over attributed impressions of each other since we had been interacting solely through CMC for the past 2 and ½ years and that too sporadically. When real world clashed with the one created online, both of us were extremely disappointed and our relationship will never be the same again.

Taking our relationship offline this time resulted in catastrophe due to the sporadic nature of our relationship which caused over attribution to occur. Since we talked less than we used to and only through a medium, Walter’s Hyperpersonal theory was in full force resulting in a very negative outcome.