I like to think of myself as a person who uses CMC to enhance his existing friendships and relationships, instead of developing new ones. While I enjoy messaging old friends at school, I don't think it is any replacement for a phone call to keep in touch. My freshman year, however, I had a close friend who was studying in India for the entire semester. In this case phone calls were essentially impossible, and we kept in contact exclusively through CMC.
Wallace's attraction factors were already in place before my friend even got on the plane to India. She and I had grown up in the same town and dated briefly about a year before, but we never really got to know each other very well. This pre-established attraction and a familiarity stemming from our shared hometown. This reversed Wallace's order of events where people get to know each other before finding physical attractiveness in online relationships. During the previous year we had barely spoken at all, but that all changed when I got my first email from India. Our first exchanges started out as a form of e-procrastination. Within two weeks though, it became clear that my friend was homesick and hoping to develop our relationship as a connection to her world at home.
My friend quickly opened up, and the disinhibition effects of CMC were obvious. She began sharing not only stories about her adventures in India, but her thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Despite being in a public internet cafe for all our exchanges, my friend clearly felt an increased self-awareness and visual anonymity that led to her increased self-disclosure. I responded with increased self-disclosure of my own. Our discussions ranged widely, but from our previous knowledge of each other we knew we had common ground, the final attraction factor.
In this instance, the disinhibition effects of CMC were the most important attraction factor. I already knew the other three factors were present in our relationship. The fact that we had a previous relationship had established this, but our increased sharing of personal feelings and beliefs over CMC brought us closer than we had ever been when we saw each other face to face. Now that my friend is back, we still talk, but interestingly enough, not as much as when she was away. Now that a richer medium is available to us, we see no reason to use email or IM, despite it's importance in facilitating our relationship. It would be interesting to see what would happen in a similar situation where the two people had no previous knowledge of each other.
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1 comment:
Michael,
I thought it was interesting that your initial communications were based on procrastination and as only a little amount of time passed it was clear she was also using you as a sort of lifeline. I believe that this in conjunction with computer mediated communication led to the disinhitibion effects. The public internet café surprised me because at least for me I feel like such a setting would make it harder for me to have increased self-awareness, but made me think about all the different settings that CMC can occur. It doesn’t always occur in the privacy of one’s home or room like I tend to think. I also agree with your concluding belief that the disinhibition effects of CMC were the more important attraction factor because I feel (as you probably do) if she hadn’t of opened up as much your communications would have been more sterile and would have been less likely to strengthen or progress the relationship. Lastly, I found it curious that when your friend returned you talk less than you did when she was away.
I feel that you did a good job integrating Wallace's attraction factors into your example and using the different factors of your relationship to explain them.
Lauren
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