Surferdude85

Because, as discussed last week, the Internet phenomenon that I am most fascinated with is the concept of forming romantic relationships in chat rooms over the Internet, I decided to take this weeks assignment as a way to further discover what this phenomenon is all about. Thus, I decided to enter a variety of “looking for love” and “singles ready to mingle” type synchronous chat rooms, in hopes of meeting my target person whom would help me with this mini case study. After a series of way to creepy encounters, however, and after a handful of different PV (private chat as I soon learned) invites, I decided to switch to a 20’s chat room, and finally met the person whom I not only felt comfortable talking with, but whom seemed the most interesting as well: Surferdude85.

Surferdude85, or John, a 21 year old art student from Toronto as I later learned, stood out among the crowd of over a dozen of these private chat invites for a variety of reasons: his first question was not the A/S/L interpersonal probe, he asked me things other than what I looked like, and, most importantly, seemed to be a very interesting person. I got the impression, even from the brief 15 minute conversation we had, that John is a very warm, slightly introverted, good natured, easy going guy that is very laid back and interested in meeting many different types of people. I determined this mainly because of his interesting questions and apparent “artsy” personality, but also because of what John did when I told him that I had no artistic abilities whatsoever.

After reveling to John that I could not even draw a normal looking house, he immediately responded with words of encouragement and expressed a want to help. In fact, he gave me the best art lesson he could over CMC, and walked me through a step-by-step way of drawing a realistic human body. And while I’m not quite sure that my end result was as realistic as we both may have hoped, his patience and the way that John expressed that he really wanted to help me reinforced all of the immediate impressions described above. In fact, I got the overall impression that John was a really great guy.

Because John and I were able to exchange social information even in the absence of nonverbal cues, my findings are aligned with the SIP model. I do believe that if I had met John face-to-face, my impression formation would have been much quicker; it took a few minutes for me to learn that John was an extremely artsy male 21 year old Canadian, something that could have been accomplished in a few seconds had we not been communicating over the computer, thus further illustrating the SIP theory.

My findings are too aligned with the Hyperpersonal model, and I believe that more of my impressions of John are due to this theory, especially the over-attribution process. Because I quickly learned that John was an art student who was very focused on his studies, I immediately formed an impression of him in my mind based on stereotypes; I pictured the soft, introverted, easy going, artsy kid that is frequently portrayed in the media, and while my impressions changed slightly as more cues were revealed, I never really strayed from this main stereotype in my mind. Moreover, I feel that my findings are too more aligned with this theory because of the selective self-presentation subcategory of the Hyperpersonal Model. John revealed very little information to me other than things surrounding his art life. While I am sure that he is much more than just an art student, most of my impressions were formed around this idea because it was the only information that was presented to me. Had John not used selective self-presentation, I perhaps could have formed a different and maybe more in depth impression of John and his personality.