I've never met anyone in "real life" after first meeting them online (honestly... I'm just not that brave). Nor do I have any friends who have (if they have, they aren't telling). So for this assignment I was left to deal with the media and their sober reporting of this subject for "inspiration".
I spent quite awhile combing blogs, newspapers, and journals looking for a tearjerking romance or an awesomely bad horror story to write about. Unfortunately I came up empty handed. The more I read the more I realized, "these are all so similar!" And they truly were. I must have read at least 60 of these testimonial/cautionary tales and each them can be summarized in one sentence:
I was expecting [blank] and (s)he was [blank].
Those two blanks being the same thing made all the difference. In fact almost all of the stories out there hinge on expectations. Every one of the daters formed a very clear mental picture of their potential suitors, and it's pretty safe to say that if they decided to take the relationship offline, they had formed mutually positive images of each other. Some of these people had been speaking for months, others had only sent a few brief emails back and forth. The amount of time they had spent talking online before their real life encounter didn't seem to be a good predictive measure for offline success. This would indicate that SIP's trademark "time" aspect doesn't seem to transcend the online/offline barrier. This would also seem to contradict the Uncertainty Reduction Theory. The daters weren't necessarily attracted by the reduction of uncertainty, but instead were only interested in seeing if their preconceived notions of a person were correct. This heavily supports the Hyperpersonal Model, in which we take the information that is available to us and, through stereotypes and hyperbole, we form a more complete profile. However, it didn't appear that the findings of the Ramirez & Wang paper held water. As stated earlier the timing (long term vs. short term) of the offline meeting did not appear to be a good predictor of success.
A great analogy for this phenomenon compared the online/offline jump to that of an audition for a movie role. The director has a mental image of character. He has an idea of how that character will look and act. If you don't fit the role you don't get the part, it's that simple. "There is only that one meeting, make or break."
So in the end it came down to expectations, and it appeared that time was not a significant factor. People's preconceived notions were either fulfilled or dashed. There were no examples of someone who was "pleasantly surprised" in their FTF encounter. William Congreve once said that, "uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life," but it seems we're only truly happy when the two converge.
1 comment:
Excellent post, Nick.
It seems that, despite our intuition, we believe that if we can present ourselves a certain way online, that this imaginative self can carry into the "real" during a modality switch. It's NEVER the case. I can imagine, a bashful and hopeful person, after months in CMC, hoping that their partner will remember their ironic use of emoticons. That seems to illustrate the point: CMC distorts our perception of what our partner expects of us.
I think you were right, however, that all of this violation and discrepancy may lead one to be, if he/she is open-minded, "pleasantly surprised." Not brutally disappointed or ecstatic. Just pleasantly suprised.
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