The idea of leaving for college for the first time is daunting and exhilarating. But in all the excitement also lies dread for leaving the comfort of home, family, and especially friends. When I left for Cornell, I worried about the sister-ly bonds that I had built up over my long years in high school and whether they would hold up in the tumult of long-distance communication. Would daily AIM messages and Facebook wall posts be enough to hold our relationships together until winter vacation? There was no choice but to test these modes of communication and to hope for the best.
McKenna’s five relationship facilitation factors provide good ground structure for communication, especially CMC interaction. Two of these factors held especially true for the long-distance relationship I had with my best friend (we'll call her Aubrey). The first, identifiability, simply states that the more you feel you can identify with someone, the more attracted you will be to them. Of course Aubrey and I are able to identify with each other, just as we had done for the past four years. However, the identifiability factor goes deeper than just sharing common ground with someone. Via the Joinson model, it is shown that visual anonymity will lead to either increased private self-awareness or decreased public self-awareness, which in turn leads to increased self-disclosure. Not only will identifying with another person make you feel more attracted to them, but the “visual anonymity” factor will also make you want to disclose more information about yourself. By using AIM more and more often, we were able to disclose our anxieties about school, our homesickness, and our exciting news with more honesty. Our mutual increased self-disclosure about our private thoughts and worries led to increased relational development. In other words, we became surprisingly close within the five months we spent apart.
The second factor that related quite well to my situation with Aubrey was the “removal of gating features”. Gates are considered ideas or concepts that tend to block a relationship from developing like it should. Examples are physical attractiveness, race, disabilities, shyness, and/or social anxiety. Though Aubrey and I don’t judge each other on the master status cues (i.e. race, stigma, disabilities), she knows that I have difficulty expressing my personal thoughts to anyone in person, and I know that she prefers to speak with few words when around other people. In McKenna’s “gating features” factor, unlike the real world, gates are not apparent on the web. I feel much more inclined to express myself and be open while I’m talking to Aubrey online, just as she feels more compelled to speak more about what’s on her mind and expand on her thoughts.
Naturally, the basis of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors seems to be based on self-disclosure. Relationships will continue to develop if there is a mutual desire to self-disclose and if the self-disclosure is taking place in an accommodating environment (e.g. on the internet where you are able to stay anonymous and you have access to information not readily available in real life).
Comments:
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/09/5-opt-2-murder-story-for-electronic.html
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/09/5-cheating-via-second-life.html
4 comments:
Thanks for sharing your story with us. I’m glad to hear that you are able to make your friendship work over a long distance like that. In my post-High School experience, I’ve found that I’ve lost touch with a lot of my old friends. Although I still keep in touch with the best of them via IM and Facebook, when we have discussions they can feel artificial and forced. I think this is because of the lack of proximity that exists; each of us conducts our own daily lives at our respective colleges, accumulating our own experiences and forming new acquaintances. When we talk, we thus acutely feel the distance separating us, leading to short, sometimes awkward IM conversations. The whole situation is kind of sad, actually, but I guess that’s life.
I enjoyed reading you post because I remember feeling similar anxieties when I went to college. I was nervous and unsure if the relationships that had lasted throughout high school were strong enough to outlast college. If only I had read McKenna's studies, I would feel more confident. The first week my friends and I chatted up a storm, so excited to share daily news about how it felt to be a "college student". As time went on, our actions followed McKenna's factors exactly. You did a great job throughly explaining the connections between identifiability, self-disclosure, and relationship development. Not only was I able to see how your friendship progressed but it also illustrated what was happening between me and my friends.
It was interesting that you only used AIM to converse. I feel that people are more comfortable communicating through this medium because it isn’t as permanent as e-mail. Perhaps if you had used e-mail exclusively and never “talked” online thorough AIM certain comfort levels would take longer time to reach.
I find it really interesting that you feel that you expressed more detail over CMC even though you already knew each other before. I would think that after a few years of a relationship with someone, you would reach a peak level of disclosure and not even CMC would change that. I'm not really sure if identifiably plays a role since you really had already identified with each other for years. The identifiability probably just continued into the CMC environment. I think that not having visual anonymity definitely plays a role in a CMC relationship regardless of how long youve known someone in person. Not being able to see someone in CMC doesn’t give you the visual cues as feedback. This absolutely alters what you say when compared to face to face conversation. I think the gating features to some extent did play a role in furthering your relationship. Overall it was a very interesting post and it made me think about CMC very differently.
I can definitely relate to your situation! Having my best friend back home in California is hard but with the use of the telephone and the internet, we are able to keep in touch and maintain our friendship as if I never left. Because my friend and I have so much in common, the more I disclose to her through chat rooms and email. You bring up a good point about self awareness and how visual anonymity is an important factor for self-disclosure. You are less concerned on how you’re being viewed and more focused on what is being said. It’s great that you and your friend Aubrey have maintained and developed your friendship via the internet and things are going good for you. Did you think an online relationship was going to be as beneficial as it has? For me I found this to be a bit surprising because I didn’t except it to actually make us even closer as friends. It’s interesting how CMC communication allows and facilitates relationships online. You did a great job in connecting the ideas to your situation!
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