Assignment 11: Too Much of a Good CMC...

As an incoming freshman at Cornell University, in the spring of 2006, I spent most afternoons perusing classof2010.cornell.edu. It’s a social network of message boards and profiles that allows all of the students in the class of 2010 to meet one another in CMC before they arrive at the Ithaca campus.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I did meet many of my current, close friends on that website first. But, my current, close friends were people with whom I only briefly discussed topics like my excitement for Cornell, where I was from, what I would be studying, etc. But, there was one particular person who I talked to everyday. In fact, my best friend who was also going to Cornell and I spoke with him everyday.

For the purpose of this blog I’ll call him John. My best friend and I thought John was so cool; we all liked the same music, movies and TV shows. John would make us laugh hysterically and he was one of the main reasons I was so excited to get to Cornell. I thought I was going to meet so many incredibly fun people like John. For months before arriving at Cornell I talked to John, for hours on some nights, and when orientation week finally rolled around, my best friend and I could not wait to meet John.

The third or so night of orientation I invited John to dinner with my roommate and I, as well as another boy my roommate knew from a summer program she had done. When I met all of my other class of 2010 friends in person, it wasn’t a big deal, but when I met John, I could not have been more nervous. Dinner at Appel that night was awful. Every IM I had shared with John was hilarious and exciting. The dinner I shared with John was awkward and uncomfortable. Online John seemed suave and quick with his words, in person he was borderline speech incapable.

I ran into John a few more times after that dinner, but our friendship outside of virtuality was nonexistent. As for all of the other people I met briefly on class of 2010, I’m pretty close with nearly all of them. Hypotheses 3 and 4 of the Ramirez and Wang paper hit this situation right on the nose. I clearly evaluated my long-term CMC association much more negatively than my short-term CMC associations. Length of association appeared to have a lot to do with how positively or negatively I reacted to my CMC friendships when they left virtuality.

Assignment 11: Back To Reality

When I signed up for Facebook, I experienced the barrage of friend requests that all soon-to-be Cornellians received in the months before school started. While I did not make much contact with most of these people beyond the initial friend request, there were a few who I exchanged a number of wall posts with. Within that group, there were some people who I began talking to through IM.

I remember one girl who I talked to often. We spoke about making plans in the future and how much we would hang out once we were at Cornell. Thus we spent the first few months of our relationship, getting to know each other and talking about a future friendship, online.

For whatever reason, neither of us made a huge effort to meet once we got on campus and it was a week or so before I ran into her unexpectedly. Our encounter was brief and we haven’t spoken since.

I think this brings another variable into account that Ramirez and Wang failed to address: time between last online contact and first face-to-face encounter. They did mention time between modality switch (if I read correctly there was a week between the online task and the face-to-face task), but they did not test it as a variable.

I wonder what effect that time gap had on the relationship between my Facebook friend and me. If we had been talking online the night before we left for school, and then planned to meet up the next day, would we have remained close? If there had been even more time in between our mode switch, would we have had more to talk about in our first FtF encounter? We could have lamented about how we had failed to keep in touch, and told each other about the start of the semester.

Regardless of this ignored variable, I think my experience was in line with Ramirez and Wang’s findings. There was more of violation of expectancy since we had known each other online for four or five months. When we talked online it was just us two, but when we met at school for the first time we were with friends and couldn’t just stop and talk to each other. This violated what we expected our relationship to be, and I think ultimately caused the rapid decline of our relationship. It seems quite apparent that modality switches can really impact a relationship.


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