During my sophomore year of high school, I was pretty much going through a "rebellious" stage in which I felt like I knew it all and could care less about anything my mother was saying. I feel like all teenagers go through it at some point. Maybe it was because I hated living in New Jersey and my mother knew that but refused to care about my opinion in moving there from my hometown. At any rate, as part of my "oh-so-rebellious-behavior" I would frequently join an AOL chat room during late hours of the night and try to find individuals willing to chat in a Brooklyn-themed chat room (my original home town). The second I would log on, I would get about three different message pop-ups reading "ASL?". The messages were always from males around the ages of 18-20 since it was obvious from my screen name at the time that I was a female. I guess this become a social norm over the internet that the first piece of information that you'd acquire from an individual in a chat room is their age, sex and location.
At first, I would talk to whoever popped up on my screen until I lost interest and found that we had nothing in common, which on average was about ten minutes. After about the second night, I met someone who was not as interested in "hooking up", as most of the others that I met, as he was interested in just finding someone to casually talk to. As time went on, this became habitual and we met in the same chat room and spoke every night.
Although I am normally a shy person when talking to people in person, I found it a lot easier to talk to this person online. According to McKenna's idea of the removal of gating features, my shyness was no longer an issue and I found that signing in to this chat room every night and having someone with whom I shared how I utterly hated where I lived and how much I missed Brooklyn with allowed us to develop a very close relationship. I guess Brooklyn became our common ground, what attracted us to each other—one of Wallace's attraction factors. Brooklyn was what we both loved and what made conversations with this person so different from the others that barely lasted. We had so much to talk about even though we were in two different states.
This went on for months and we began to not only talk about the place we loved so much but ended up learning a great deal about each other and having a lot more personal conversations. As time went on, it seemed as if there was nothing that we didn't tell each other (McKenna's disinhibition effects), as if we were dating or in a relationship online.
For those of you who want to know how it turned out, we did end up meeting each other FtF when I moved back to Brooklyn a year later, but our friendship online and offline kind of died down as we got older and started hanging out with different people.
3 comments:
Thanks for telling us how it turned out..for a second I thought you were going to leave me wondering! It seems like this was a really good online experience for you. I feel like this example ties in with impression formation and social support as well as relationship formation online. It's great that you found a connection to your hometown to help you cope with the move.
Yes, I agree with Beth, thanks for letting us know how it turned out! I'm glad you were able to find someone with so many common interests and developing such a friendship online (if only for a somewhat brief moment.) Did you think that this experience has helped you more with your shyness because you were able to share so much?
Great example of a CMC relationship. I think it really relates to what we talked about last week as well with the on line support groups. I know that when I've made some big moves in the past, blogging, chatting and e-mailing with people from home really helpped me aclimated myself to the new location. The longer I was there, the less I did it.
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