My relationship with a former girlfriend occurred in reverse of the relationships we have been studying in class. We studied relationship factors and theories that allow formation of relationships in online space, which eventually leads to an offline relationship. My relationship started offline, but it ultimately went online. My friend had introduced me to one of his friends and we started going out. About three months after our relationship started, she had to move out of the state. Our means of communication went from seeing each other face to face to talking on the phone, AIM, and through games. Eventually our relationship degraded and we decided to split up, but during the online part of our relationship, Wallace's attraction factors played a key part in at least bring us a little closer together.
The first attraction factor that allowed us to continue our relationship was proximity. The factor is defined essentially as the ability to meet. In the online space, it's determined by intersection frequency, the number of events in which you meet someone in a common online psychological space. My friend who introduced us played a lot of online games. As a result, he would introduce both my former girlfriend and myself to free multiplayer games. This increased our intersection frequency as we met more often in different spaces. As a result, we felt “closer” in proximity to each other. In addition, we always used the phone and AIM to communicate. The frequency of meeting online was greater than when we met face to face. On average, I would meet her about four times a week before she moved. After she moved, we met in common spaces almost every day. The increased proximity allowed us to become more familiar as we saw the same person frequently in a number of intersecting means.
Common ground also played a role in maintaining our relationship. According to Wallace's reasoning of common ground, attraction increases as the proportion of shared attributes increases. When we were physically together, we discovered that we disagreed on a number of points. For example, when we watched movies together, we disagreed on the ratings for it. Her interests for movies differed greatly from mine. However, when our relationship went online, we had less conflicting points. We had less shared experiences that revealed our corresponding opinions of those experiences. Thus, we had less differing opinions, resulting in a larger proportion of common ground attributes. Most of our common ground was found only through events we choose to discuss online, which were far fewer in number than those that occurred to us simultaneously in physical space. According to the Law of Attraction, this greater proportionality created attraction between us.
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Henry,
It was interesting to hear about a relationship that began in FTF and later went to CMC. I agree that intersection is much more frequent when talking to people online, so it definitely contributed to your relationship and helped it continue despite the physical separation. As for disagreements, it seems like there are less online because if someone says something you disagree with you can just ignore it and not type a response, or just shrug it off and assume you misunderstood them; in person it is harder to avoid conflict and it seems like this was the case in your relationship. Overall it was a very nice post.
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