While at my friends birthday party in New York City at the very end of last summer, I met a guy, who, following last weeks post, we will call X. Knowing that we would get along very well, the host of the party introduced us, and X and I immediately hit it off. We chatted and laughed throughout the entire evening, and even extended our conversation following the party over coffee and French fries, at the posh late night establishment that Sex and the City made famous called Coffee Shop, located in NYC’s union square.
X and I exchanged phone numbers, acknowledged that we would obviously “friend” each other on Facebook when we got home, and even swapped AIM addresses in order to keep in touch. We tried to arrange another meeting time, but with the end of the summer approaching and both of us going away to our respective schools in just a few days, we just weren’t able to find time before the summer ended to see each other.
Because X and I had enjoyed such a lovely evening that summer night, we kept in touch while we both were at school. Even though X was in Durham, North Carolina and I was in Ithaca, New York, we talked pretty much every single day. This, however, was largely due to computer mediated communication, and the ease, comfort, and availability of instant messaging and e-mail.
After talking to X for a few weeks, I felt like I knew him better than I knew anyone else. Even though we had known each other for such a short period of time, we revealed to each other things that some of our best friends did not even know, and were not afraid to tell each other anything. While it was nice to have someone like this whom I could talk to, it was too weird how comfortable we were talking to one another after such a short amount of time.
This, however, can be described by McKenna’s relationship facilitation factor of “identifiability.” Because most of our relationship was built off of computer-mediated communication, visual anonymity (the fact that we could not see each others faces) lead to an increase in private self-awareness, which lead to more self-disclosure (a revealing of information about ourselves that is not publicly known). Although we did meet in person and knew what each other looked like, our increased self-disclosure was due to an increased awareness of how we saw ourselves. Moreover, computer mediated communication in general has high levels of self-disclosure, and my relationship with X illustrates this theory.
Furthermore, I additionally illustrated McKenna’s relationship factor of “getting the goods,” as I asked my friend who introduced us all the “dirt” on X before I decided to further our relationship. “Getting the goods” refers to the ability to get information prior to meeting a person, and my millions of questions that I asked about X truly exemplifies this idea. I quizzed my friend on his family history, past relationships, favorite foods, humor, intelligence, athletic abilities, and even his clothing style (as this is very important to me) before I decided to continue communication with X. Had she revealed information on these subjects that I had not approved of, I am unsure as to whether or not I would have continued communication with him.
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You did a good job giving an analysis of how McKenna’s factors applied to your relationship with X. The increased degree of self-disclosure definitely seems to be one of the most important elements that make CMC work for developing relationships. Similarly “getting the goods” is all about more information that forms your opinion of him. Maybe in a FtF setting the biggest difference would be that you’d have to rely more on “getting the goods” to learn about X than directly talking to him, as there would probably be less self-disclosure, although FtF conveys a different set of information about someone.
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