I have experienced some long distance relationships, but I wanted to share one of my friend’s experiences because it closely relates to McKenna’s relationship formation model. My friend from home (Houston, TX) recently came out and to become more acquainted with the gay community, she friended other gay people using myspace. Many of Wallace’s attraction factors and McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors played a large role in the development of her online friendships.
In particular, my friend became very close to a girl named “Jane” from Philadelphia. To find Jane, she first searched people by their sexuality, music, and interests. She then filtered them out by their attractiveness according to their profile picture until she finally came across Jane. As seen in Wallace’s common ground principle, which is also similar to McKenna’s connecting to similar others factor, my friend was interested in Jane because of their common interests and the Law of Attraction. Since she saw that they had similar tastes in music and interests, their proportion of shared interests (in that area only) was high. My friend’s searching/profiling of Jane relates to McKenna’s getting the goods factor, in which, before deciding to message her, she analyzed her profile and comments to get a feel for whether she would get along with Jane. From there, they began messaging, IMing, texting, calling, until they finally met in person. Now, they are close friends and frequently travel together. The progress of their relationship completely identifies with McKenna’s relationship formation model in which, there was photo assessment --> survey of attributes --> contact --> (if reciprocal) ftf meeting.
I was amazed at how quickly my friend was able to become so close to Jane, who she had just met on myspace, but what seemed to bring them closer was that they both confided in each other and disclosed very personal information. It was as if my friend had known Jane for a long time because she would constantly talk about Jane and tell me about her coming out story, family problems, relationship dramas, etc. All this information about Jane came about because of Wallace’s disinhibition effect, where there is an increased role of self-disclosure in relational development. The online communication allowed them to share very personal issues with each other and when one party would disclose their secrets, the other party felt the need to impart their secrets as well. Although, I was first very skeptical of her messaging strangers online, her assessments have allowed her to friend and relate to many gay people from across the states.
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http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-5-option-1-long-distance.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-5-option-1-making-it-to-top.html
1 comment:
I really enjoy this post. I think it’s extremely interesting how your friend was able to narrow down all of the people on myspace to one girl, Jane, and it just so happens that Jane was in fact a good pick to be a friend. It’s also interesting how despite living in different parts of the country, your friend chose common ground, more than proximity as a reason to message Jane. Despite the physical distance separating them, the intersectional frequency was rather high between the two girls, making their relationship seem like one that existed in a really close proximity. This anecdote is a great example of how people are able to express their real selves on the web and self-disclose important information about themselves in order to create strong relationships. It especially displays how Anticipated Future Interaction has an effect on what people self-disclose on the web.
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