When I first told my friend, X, that I got accepted early decision to Cornell University, her first words, “AHHH! I’m so proud of you, and I have the PERFECT roommate for you. She just got in early too, and I know you two will LOVE each other.”
Now, sitting at my computer 3 years later, the words PERFECT and LOVE seem beyond ironic. You see, after living in a way too small of a dorm room with my roommate whom I will call Y, it seems that even if we lived in the largest room in the world, she would still be, perhaps, anything but perfect for me.
My feelings, however, were not always this way towards Y. In fact, PERFECT and LOVE would be two words I too would have used to describe her when we first started talking through AIM. We both loved Laguna Beach, Grey’s Anatomy, and Desperate Housewives. We both had the same favorite restaurant, and loved the same dish from it. We both did similar things in high school, and it seemed that we both wanted the same things out of college. To sum it all up, it seemed that our interests were perfectly aligned, so when she asked if I wanted to room with her, I of course was not hesitant about starting what I wanted to be a PERFECT college experience with a PERFECT roommate.
After Y and I decided to be roommates, we attempted to set up multiple face-to-face meetings. Yet, with the end of senior year craziness and with me going away for the summer prior to freshman year, that plan just never worked out. So, when I walked in to my dorm room on that Thursday, August 18, 2005, there she was, for the first time in front of me, Y.
From the way too loud screech of Y’s “LAAAUUUUUUURENNNNN!!!!!” when I walked in the door, I had doubts that my PEREFECT roommate would be less then PERFECT. Yet, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Then, when her way too strange study, hygienic, eating, and communication tactics started becoming things that began affecting my life and happiness, I knew that this PEREFECT mixed-mode relationship was anything but. I would constantly be woken up at 4am by a printer or the lights, would have to step through piles of her clothes and garbage and food just to get to my side of the room, and even found a cockroach in my fridge one day because of her food supply.
Leaving the virtual world and entering the real world with Y is best described by Walther’s Hyperpersonal Model. The Hyperpersonal Model is made up of:
1. The over-attribution process: Few cues lead to a stereotype
2. Developmental aspect: Given time, we adapt our cues to the social channel
3. Selective self-presentation: In CMC, you select what you present to your partner. When leaving the virtual world, you have less control over your information sharing
4. Re-allocation of cognitive resources: When you talk in face-to-face settings, you have to worry about many different things. Because in CMC you have less to worry about, you can devote more resources and time to what you are saying
5. Behavioral Confirmation: We end up trying to behave how people think we are (Walther 1997)
The two aspects, however, of this model that apply to Y and mine's mix-mode relationship are the over-attribution process and selective self-presentation.
The Over-Attribution Process
The fewer cues present in CMC allowed me to over attribute the few cues I had of Y. Because we both seemed to have similar interests, our mutual likes of Laguna Beach and the restaurant “Joes” created an inflated impression of Y that was completely inaccurate.
Selective Self-Presentation
Y most definitely was a victim of selective self-presentation; she managed her impression by only telling me things on AIM that she knew I would find attractive. For obvious reasons, Y completely neglected to tell me that she worked best at all hours of the night and slept most of the day and did not share with me that she was a total slob, yet had we met and built a relationship in a face-to-face setting, these cues would have been visible, as it is apparent that Y is perhaps not the with it, put together, and PEREFECT after spending just a mere five minutes in a face-to-face conversation with her.
Comments:
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/11/stalkers.html
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-myself-have-never-experienced-online.html
1 comment:
Your post provides food for thought. You based a decision to take on Y as your roommate because, based on her online persona, she seemed the perfect fit, but it turned out to not be the case. Excluding the SIP theory, the URT, hyperpersonal, and MS theory all predict a change in the way we see our online partners; does this mean that we should only sparingly depend on our perceptions of our online friends? Although some of the theories predict a positive outcome after the modality switch, and some theories a negative one, they all imply that a mediated channel will always lack some information that FTF can provide, and in some cases, very vital information. I feel that, in time, you may have been able to pick up some of her less appealing habits, but it’s possible that some of Y’s traits may be indefinitely hidden from you no matter how much time you spend with her online.
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