Assignment 5: Option 1

Hi,

For this assignment I’m choosing to write about a relationship that formed in CMC and then turned into an Ftf relationship. Before coming to college students are able to create facebook accounts with their school e-mail and can start adding other prospective students as friends. Like many other students I entered into one of these long-distance relationships with a girl who would be in my graduating class.

Wallace’s Attraction factors include physical attraction, proximity, common ground, and disinhibition effects. The factors that played the most important role with my long distance relationship over facebook were the roles of physical attraction in cmc, proximity, and common ground. A girl who I will call Abby sent me a message over facebook saying that she liked a band I had listed in my favorite music section and pointed out that we were in the same major, and this was the start of our cmc communication. This first interaction is made possible by the common ground theory which states that people are attracted to people with whom they share common interest. Also falling under this category is the law of attraction which states the better proportion of things you share in common the more attracted you will be to a person. Thus having to things in common is a good thing. Next me and Abby continued sending messages back and forth nearly every day thus keeping in CMC proximity. Wallace states that online familiarity flows from intersection frequency, which is the amount of times you bump or talk to each other online. Looking at this me and Abby formed a very close relationship over CMC by continuous messages. Lastly physical attractiveness works backwards in CMC. In Ftf you see someone whose physically attractive and you then get to know them better, but in CMC you get to know someone and find out physical attractiveness first. Because this was a long distance relationship I was only able to see a few pictures provided by facebook before actually getting to know about her.

Analyzing this relationship through Mckenna’s relationship facilitation factors I find some similar findings. Three of these factors, removal of gating features, connecting with similar others, and getting the goods played major roles in the development of our relationship. Firstly getting the goods, which is the ability to get information about others before meeting, played a crucial role in our initial interaction. Before I had ever known who this person was, she was able to look at my profile and extract information about me from it before communicating with me. Next there is the removal of gating features which states that CMC allows you to over come gates of physical attractiveness, important status cues, and shyness. Of course being on facebook we had limited access to all of this information. Abby had even told me that in public she is much more shy, thus CMC facilitated her interaction. Then lastly connecting with similar others is the same result as the common ground principle of Wallace’s theory. Examining all of this I find that my long distance relationship coincides with both theories perfectly.