I was always very skeptical about the use of online dating sites because they seem to run perilously close to a cold, industrialized sort of romance-- who can honestly use the medium of a webpage to fully represent themselves and gauge the attractiveness of a partner who could potentially require a big investment of time and resources? While I was skeptical, I acknowledged that it was also very convenient and allowed for easy interactions. I eventually found myself staring at an online banner for match.com featuring an incredibly attractive woman. I thought to myself, "This woman is waiting for me on match.com!? SIGN ME UP!" and immediately signed up.
I made an account and then waited like all good fishermen must. One day I got an e-mail from someone asking about my music interests. I wrote back talking mostly about the same music she had listed in her page. Although this selective self-presentation (predicted by the Hyperpersonal Model/ Conversational Common Ground (Clark 1996)) would come up later, we continued to correspond via e-mail. Eventually, I asked her to meet me for a game of scrabble and to listen to some awesome music. When we met in person, I was first disgruntled to see that she was a little heavier and older than advertised, but at first we hit it off pretty well.
Then my all time favorite song, The Dugout, by Ladyhawk came on, and my date said, "I thought you listened to good music..." to which I responded, "Yea, I didn't even say that I listened to great music." But she was not amused. And slowly, we each became more and more cold. I said, "Hey, this band has a member that is brothers with one of my professors," and she just shrugged and I looked longingly at my "The Psychology of the Internet" book. With all my deeply-rooted internet knowledge, why was this still going so poorly? Pat Wallace would know what to do.
Meanwhile, it turned out that the majority of music we liked was completely different, and the few artists that had been the subject of our many e-mails, were actually appreciated for very different reasons. This outcome is predicted by the Hyperpersonal model in that, once we left the virtual environment, we had much less control over the information we were sharing. When online, we were able to talk about only things we had in common; face-to-face we were forced to talk about the many, many things we did not, including the fact that Mitch Hedberg is the greatest comedian of all time. I also had an inflated perception of her since our CMC interactions exaggerated the things we had in common, so I was primed to be disappointed. My experience contradicts the prediction by Ramirez & Wang that a short term CMC relationship would lead to an enhanced interaction in FtF. Needless to say, the closest I got to H-E-A-V-E-N on that date was my triple letter score on the 'V'.
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/11/assignment-11_27.html#c933909972979937154
http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/11/assignment-11_2183.html#c3607110776969821211
1 comment:
Hey Brian,
You had a really great post, I enjoyed reading it a lot. When you mentioned Ladyhawk I laughed and thought maybe this post was just a ploy to get your post up on the big screen in class. After reading your post though, you did a great job tying your match.com experience to the theories we learned about in class. I completely agree with your explanation that your interaction in CMC was fostered by the hyperpersonal model. It seems your match.com did a bit of selective self-presentation too being “slightly overweight”. It was interesting to see that in CMC you had much more limited interactions, while when you interacted FtF you were faced with much broader conversation pieces. This struck me as interesting as I couldn’t recall any theories mentioning this. Perhaps there could be a study done to look at whether people talk about more topics in FtF than in CMC. Again, really great post, it was a great read.
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