Assignment 3: Me as an Older Man

I decided to switch genders and age and temporarily became “Georgeofthejungle” on chatfamily.com. I choose a general adult chat room that was supposedly clean cut. I chose the screen name to depict (hopefully) a fun loving and masculine man. I decided to act like the kind of guy I’d want to meet in chat room as a single female—a gentleman with manners looking for female friendship. In order to make my intentions clear, I private messaged a few female names with the greeting “Good evening, lovely lady.” I tried to use correct punctuation and grammar to match my online persona. I followed soon after with a state intention to make mature friendships with women with great personalities. Surprisingly, a few females ended the conversation immediately. However, “mallgirl” seemed to be interested and continued the conversation.

I managed my impression by selecting which attributes to present. I wanted to make sure she knew I was clean cut. When I asked her to tell me about herself, she responded with her physical measurements. I told her she sounded beautiful, but I was actually looking for details about her personality. I chose to say this because it made me sound like a gentlemen who respects women. She was slow to respond with some traits, and I felt like she was being rude. Her hesitance made me feel like she wanted to talk only about physical appearance and not anything deeper. However, I realize this was my thinking on the terms of the fundamental attribution error. I assumed her slow response was because she was a promiscuous or rude person when it could very well be that she was busy or talking to another person. If it were me who were slow to respond and someone accused me of being superficial or impolite, I would be insulted since I probably had a good reason (or told myself so).

My selves presented were ideal and actual self. Even though ideal self is more likely to happen in an asynchronous environment, I found myself trying to acting the way I felt a gentleman should. Of course, this was due to the fact that I had developed an ideal character before beginning my chat. However, if I decided how I wanted to be viewed each time I entered CMC, I could always portray my ideal self. My actual self was inevitable because at times, I slipped out of character. Being online, I did not put much effort into my character because no one could see me. If it were FtF and I were dressing up as a man literally, I would be more careful. Since I didn’t have to worry about physical traits of a man, I forget to continue my impression after a while. For example, I accidentally used an emoticon and too many exclamation points. I thought I was being friendly and outgoing, but after reading Jason Cohen’s blog, I realized I was wrong. He said that these were classic female chatting characteristics. Oh well! =]