I found that McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors were particularly relevant for one of my “relationships” during my freshman year at college. During my freshman year here at Cornell, I used to hang out at my friend’s resident hall since I hated the one that I lived in. One day while I was hanging out with him and a couple other people in the dorm, I met a cute, quiet-looking girl. Our encounter lasted less than three or four minutes and when I had to leave, I pretty much forgot about the girl. A couple days later, I got a random IM from someone whose screen name I had never seen before. It was that same girl I had met the other night. We started to chat and I started to make her “lol” and it seemed like we were hitting it off. Then, I ran into her in person and I couldn’t stand to be around her for more than five minutes. It seemed like we had nothing in common and we could barely carry a conversation. After this awkward encounter, we chatted on AIM and everything was all good again. We continued these AIM chat sessions until we had to meet up show affection in ways you can’t do on AIM.
This relationship continued and got more intimate purely because of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors, especially the removal of gating factors and interactional control. Like I said, I could not stand to be around the girl (or to talk to her at least) for more than five minutes at time. I don’t remember what it was about her that kept me from being able to tolerate her presence but I remember thinking that I liked way more when I didn’t have to hear her. Online, I could put her on the backburner. I could do some homework, listen to some music, watch a movie or even chat with someone more interesting while I nurtured this little “relationship” I had going with her. Without the pesky little gating factors like FTF conversation and being seen together in public, we would not have gotten as far as we did. Interaction control was the reason that our “relationship” even existed. AIM allowed me to determine how much attention I paid to her every time we interacted. When I spoke to her, I could not just walk away from her in the middle of a conversation just because I had gotten bored.
In many ways, AIM was the only space in which we could have a relationship, since I don’t believe that we could have one in which we had to interact face to face on a regular basis.
7 comments:
Mike, you bring up a good point about how much attention we pay to people, and how we have more control over that online. I don’t think we addressed this in class, but you can have a lot more going on when you interact with someone online than you can in person. In person, it would be rude to keep turning away from this girl to talk to someone else, or to stop talking to her every minute or so to work on a paper you were writing. Online, however, it’s practically expected that you’re doing multiple things at once. Lastly, it was interesting how you connected it to how you felt about her. If this girl was intolerable in person or one on one, then talking to her through AIM was certainly the right choice. It’s a really fascinating point you make that the internet will help us tolerate someone we normally would not be able to stand, simply because it gives us a lot more to do when we talk to them.
Mike
I definitely agree with you that it can be a lot easier to meet people online than in person. There's a lot more freedom that you have when you meet someone online in the way that you did. In a similar fashion, I met a bunch of people online before my freshman year at Cornell. I found that geting to know them beforehand through a computer-based medium made it a lot easier to get to know them without having to deal with the awkwardness of meeting face to face. It also gave a basis for our friendships beforehand. I think talking to people online first gives you a lot of background with another person before you have to meet them face to face for relationships where you more or less have to start off well. It's a lot more relaxed, informal, and there are far fewer consequences if things go awry. I think this has a lot to do with the success of online relationships through websites like eHarmony and so on. In any case, I'm glad that you were able to develop your relationship online and that it was a successful "transition" into a face-to-face relationship.
Ashish
Mike, I found your post really interesting. I bet you couldnt stand her in person because her voice was really annoying. I can relate with your expierence about getting along with people more over instant message and other non rich communication rather than FTF, but the reasons you gave were insightful and interesting ones that I had not considered. The idea of multi-tasking is especially intriguing. It would be interesting to actually test whether spreading your cognitive resources over many tasks causes more favorable impression formation and facilitates relationships. This phenomenon could be tested over a nubmer of different communication mediums, but as you realized, it is much easier to mulitask online whereas in FTF it is considered rude. Great Post.
Hey Mike. I found your blog to be very interesting for various reasons. Not only have I felt similarly about the benefit of developing relationships in a mediated environment, but also, I understand the difficulties that can arise in a subsequent FtF interaction. I agree with you that McKenna’s Facilitation Factors, namely Removal of Gating Features and Interactional Control, played significant roles in the development of your relationship. In talking online, you removed many gating features, and were thus able to control your interaction through focusing, or not focusing, on the person to whom you were speaking. You would have offered a more complete analysis, however, if you identified which gating features you benefited from removing, and how you specifically controlled your interaction. From my reading your blog, it appears that you benefited most from controlling the frequency, duration, and intensity of your interaction. I am curious, however, why you were so averse to speaking to your friend in person, and how the relationship turned out.
I thought your post was really interesting. Interactional control is one of the greatest aspects of AIM in my opinion becuase of multitasking, gating features and other reasons, and obviously it helped out your relationship with "Jane" quite a bit as well. I was surprised at first about how negative you were when talking about meeting her face to face and enjoying your talks online, but I then I thought about how different people's personalities can come off in CMC as opposed to FtF. Some people are hysterical in person but thier humor doesn's translate into type. Apparently this girl should attempt to do all of her social interacting online if possible.
I can definitely relate to this story of being able to handle someone online, but once the face to face interaction comes in you just want to beat them with the broad side of a shovel. I’d never really thought about it the way you presented it, but you’re right, the idea of being able to multitask online must play a huge role in it. Can you imagine if you were talking with someone face to face, and then they ignored you in the middle of your sentence for 3 minutes while they read some sports stories? It just doesn’t translate that way into the face to face medium. The key to your whole interaction was being able to remove the gating and being able to control how much or how little you interacted. I wonder how the two of you interacted in a bigger group? There, you could sort of put her on the backburner while you talked to other people. Unless it was her general aura that bothered you, in which case she might as well move all her social interactions to cyberspace.
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