Assignment #2: An Interview with a BMW1600

The forums are always a wonderful place to find all sorts of people, and by tracking a person’s posts, it becomes child’s play piecing together their habits and characteristics. An advantage of the forums is that veteran posters tend to be more open than in an instant message conversation. Offtopic.com happens to archive many of their “epic” threads, and a quick search for common handles drew my eye to “BMW1600.”

His first post started with:

“When I eventually come to my senses and discard my belief in God, how long is the waiting period before I am allowed to start attacking those who still believe?”

Even from his opening post, I could tell that was a sarcastic, but very entertaining person. This one sentence alone showed some hostility toward atheists, a sign of neuroticism, justified by the fact that many of his threads parody well known and infamous posters on Offtopic. The entire thread itself had no higher purpose than to rile and amuse, which, combined with his 61,263 posts, reveals him to be an extrovert with a love of attention. BMW1600 doesn’t just open up a can of worms with his threads, he likes to play with those he frustrates and bask in the praise of other posters.

I would prefer to reserve judgment on his openness since his parody of atheists throughout the thread seemed more tongue-in-cheek than scathing. He might very well be one himself, fed up by the constant barrage launched by atheists toward the God-fearing, however unlikely that is. He may be very open or very closed to new ideas, and because of his perchance to parody, his true character is a bit harder to discern. Whether he’s an agreeable fellow or not is up for grabs, considering I didn’t have the opportunity to observe him responding to the threads of others, but his cynicism suggests that BMW1600 may be a bit less than trusting and a lot less than compliant toward others. Same goes for his conscientiousness; while I don’t see any definitive evidence that points toward a meticulous, careful person, there is a feeling that many of his posts were cleverly written to get the most response, positive and negative, from the Offtopic community.

My impressions are evidence for the hyperpersonal theory, which states that, because of the lack of many cues in CMC, one tends to overemphasize the traits of the target person. Even from his sentence, I was inferring things about BMW1600’s characteristics and beliefs. Despite my attempt at objectivity, it is far too easy to see more than what’s there, and because I may never meet BMW1600 in person, I will never know whether my impressions were right or wrong.