Assignment #11 Freshman Facebooking

Almost two years ago I experienced a phenomenon that has sprung up over the past few years with the invention of Facebook. After I was accepted to Cornell, one of the first things I did was set up a Facebook account. Within days I already had tons of Facebook friends who were going to be in my class the following year. While I was pretty wary of these kids, mainly dismissing them as weirdoes, one girl who wrote on my wall seemed pretty cool. She was from California and liked the same music that I did. I responded back and soon after we were talking on a pretty consistent basis. We talked over the summer and before I knew it, I was already at Cornell. I was a little nervous and concerned about meeting my Facebook friend in person. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but we talked and decided to meet for lunch. Unfortunately, our online personalities didn’t connect like they did in person, and lunch was very quiet and pretty awkward. Perhaps if we had continued to meet we would have grown accustomed to each other, but after that strange lunch, we never met again.

At first glance I felt that my online relationship was fostered by Berger & Calabrese’s Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT). At the beginning of my relationship, I only knew a very little bit about my friend when we first met on Facebook, but as we began to chat online, through self-disclosure I increased my information about my friend. Through this increased information, it led to greater liking and intimacy of our relationship. However, this breaks with URT when it switches modality from CMC to FtF. URT predicts a positive outcome when those in a relationships leave virtuality, however with my relationship this wasn’t the case.

While my experience doesn’t necessarily coincide well with the URT, it does fit very well with Rameriez & Wang’s paper on the subject. The two stipulate that; “studies which support the “enhancement” assumption do not allow much time to pass between when communicators commence their interactions via CMC and subsequently meet FtF, thus limiting the amount of message exchange that can occur, whereas studies that do not provide support report an extended period of online interaction prior to the in-person meeting.” Showing that perhaps there’s a difference between short-term and long-term interactions. Rameriez & Wang look at this and hypothesize that; “MS following a long-term association via CMC will provide social information that will be (a) evaluated more negatively and (b) uncertainty-provoking relative to interacting via CMC.” My interaction with my Facebook friend certainly follows this hypothesis. We communicated in CMC for a long period of time prior to our meeting, which resulted in a very cold and uncomfortable FtF meeting.

On a side note, as this is my final blog of the semester, I’d just like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed blogging out to the blogosphere, and hopefully will continue with my blogging in the future. Thanks to all of you who commented on my posts, your insight was very interesting and I enjoyed reading them.

Comments:

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2774598650119543771&postID=8058640859832045678

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2774598650119543771&postID=7262384376925848937