Assignment#11: If it were LTA, I am not sure whether my friend would have had her first boyfriend at that time.

In my junior high school year in Korea, it was popular to make friends online usually through online chat. After club activities, my friends and I stayed in our club room and went to online chatting website called ‘Sayclub.’ Since there was only one computer available, we all watched my friend, Yoonjung, looking for a new friend. She wondered around several chat rooms under the category of junior high and high school students. After a while, she found a room with about 5 people. All of them exchanged ASL as usual. Among them, she found a guy who goes to a high school in the same town. As common ground factor predicted, same age group and location fostered developing a positive impression of each other. My friend continued to talk to him four or five more times afterwards. They decided to meet eventually. Since cell phone was not popular at that time, in order to meet, they exchanged their pictures and told what kind of clothes they would be wearing on that day. When they had MS from CMC to FtF, they even liked each other more and started dating. This is how my friend, Yoonjung, had her first boyfriend.

Yoonjung’s experience is consistent with the results discussed in the Ramirez & Wang paper. This case was examined under Hypothesis 4 that MS following a short-term association via CMC will provide social information that will be evaluated more positively and uncertainty-reducing than interacting via CMC (Ramirez & Wang, 2004). In total, Yoonjung and her boyfriend had about only five or six times of conversation before MS to FtF. So, this case can be considered as STA. Based on Hyperpersonal perspective, spending relatively short time online lets both communicators to less idealize or over-attribute partner’s image. Then, encountering real person in FtF interaction would likely yield less disappointment. Therefore, social information provided by MS has high likelihood to be evaluated positively and positive impressions help communicators to reduce uncertainty as Yoonjung and her boyfriend liked each other more after MS. As Ramirez & Wang discussed in their paper, timing was an important factor in my friend’s case. If they exchanged more personal information for a long period of time, they should have developed a strong over-attributed impression of each other. MS to FtF would likely show that their partner was actually a normal, common student, then, expectancy violation would be incongruent with past information or impression they have been building. As EVT predicted, it increases uncertainty and has relationship-dampening effects. There was one more factor which played a major role in this case: exchange of each other’s photo. People in this website used picture as their best tool to glamorize themselves. Yoonjung and her boyfriend also had their best picture up online. So, this very selective self-representation encouraged them to develop positively over-attributed impression of their partner.