Hi, my name is Selina Lok. I was born in Queens, NY but was raised in East Hanover, NJ, where shockingly, there are more dead than living people! I’m a junior majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering and minoring in Information Science. For the first time, I spent my summer in Ithaca where I got to visit many of the beautiful waterfalls in the nearby state parks. I like swimming, skiing, and playing tennis, and I love traveling, music, and watching movies. I’ve used internet for as long as I remember; from playing computer games like Starcraft, World of Warcraft, and Counter-Strike to shopping online for clothes or books (from Amazon or half.com) to meeting people online to webcamming friends from other schools.
I’m very interested in the different personas we have online, such as through instant messaging, versus in the physical world. I know many people that I can talk to for hours with online, yet only manage to have a few minutes of conversing in person. There are these awkward moments of silence as we sit face-to-face that don’t exist when we instant message. Is it possible that awkward moments don’t really exist online because we may be chatting with other friends at the same time or surfing the web and not notice the moments we don’t chat? How can 2 hours pass by so quickly when we are talking through instant messages, like AIM, yet 5 minutes never seems to pass by when I see the person? It’s not the same case with everyone though. For some people, it’s the total opposite. I will have no problems interacting in person but when we talk online we have absolutely nothing to talk about. We’d say hi, ask what’s up, update each other about how our day was and that’s about it. What is it that makes it easier to speak with someone on an instant messaging program like AIM versus in person or vice versa? I’m curious in what other people think about this and if you share the same experiences.
The online space this phenomenon fits under would be synchronous chat space, in which instant messaging programs like AIM, Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger are a part of.
2 comments:
This is a very interesting point. Talking to people online allows a few minutes to pass by in silence without any awkwardness, but silence in person or on the phone can be very uncomfortable. Online, there doesn't seem to be a need to keep up a constant stream of conversation. Because there are other things to do online besides go on AIM, it's understood that you may not be devoting your full attention to your IMs. Calling a person or talking to him/her face-to-face, on the other hand, implies that you are willing to devote all your attention to the conversation.
Hey, Selina. I have also observed this difference that you describe between instant messaging someone with complete ease, but having little to talk about when face to face and vice versa. I thought you made a good point. And it seems that handling long pauses in an AIM conversation is always less awkward than when in person because of the vast number of excuses that can be made for slow, irregular responses that are not available when you’re just seated across from someone in silence. What intrigued me most about your blog was your question of whether awkward moments can ever really exist online. You seemed to lean toward the inability for awkwardness to exist via an AIM conversation. Though it seems much harder for a tongue-tied pause to arise when IMing, I think it’s definitely possibly if you consider the subject of the conversation and the participants involved. Take for example, two people IMing who are seemingly just friends when one suddenly asks, “So do you ever see us being more than friends?” This is likely to lead to a long, definitely awkward pause, and for good reason. Though IMing can allow us to escape many uncomfortable situations there are certain topics that can without a doubt still make us feel awkward.
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