Reading A Classmate's Journal

For this assignment, I decided to do something slightly different than expected. Instead of interacting with or observing someone completely random, I decided to analyze the journal posts of someone in my engineering communications technical writing class that I took previously this summer. In this class, we were divided into three groups which each had to produce a magazine article on an emerging technology. In addition, each week we were required to provide a commentary, through the use of a blog-based journal, on the communication that was going on within our team: what was working, what was not working, how the team and individuals could communicate more effectively, etc. Although we shared the same class, this person, whose name is Brandon, is essentially a stranger to since he was not in my group, and intergroup interaction was limited to presentations and peer editing. Thus, I believe my choice of a target to study is interesting in that he is still essentially a stranger to me, but I am very familiar with the context from which he is writing his blog posts.
It is best to describe my impression of this person in terms of the big-five characteristics. It seems that Brandon is somewhat neurotic, constantly expressing worry over the fact that his group easily gets distracted, or that they are constantly on a different page, or whatnot. It would be safe to assume that he feels overwhelmed by group work, which he says he has very little experience with. He is also an introvert, explaining how he thinks about and analyzes things going on in his group very much, but does not thoroughly express this to his group members. It is clear that there is more going on behind the scenes with Brandon. Despite this, I believe that Brandon is very open, and judging from his blog posts about how his group functions it seemed like he was the group leader if one had to be chosen, coordinating the group’s activities and inciting discussion among the group members to keep everyone on the same page. However, I don’t think Brandon if very agreeable overall, because on more than one occasion he explained how it was hard for him to get his group to understand and accept his ideas, which he considered correct, obviously. Brandon even mentions the struggle in the context of group work of trying to get one’s ideas across amid competition from the rest of the group. Finally, I think that Brandon is conscientious. In all of his decisions about the article, he took the others in his group into account, and tried his best to keep all of the other members in his group happy.
It was more difficult to derive personality through these blog posts than I thought it would be. It seems that the fact that the posts are focused on communication about a group article, and not simply different experiences in the author’s life, like most journals, limited the impression that can be formed from them. I believe that this aligns most closely with Social Information Processing theory, which says that impression formation develops more slowly in computer-mediated communication. However, I don’t think that these entries support Cues-Filtered-Out theory as much, due to the fact that the author conveyed much of his personality and was very open in these blog posts, and this interaction was limited only by the face of face-to-face interaction. I feel like the more posts I read, the more and more I could identify with and understand the person behind them, but this was still slower than it would be in a face-to-face interaction, especially considering that I am someone who derives a lot from things such as body language and other nonverbal cues.