Assignment #2: Muffin the Cat

As I have not entered a chat room since I was 12 years old, I had some difficulty initially finding one. I searched “chat rooms” on Google and came to a free chat room sponsored by Google called ParaChat. After creating a false name and then sending “what’s going on?” to the room, I instantly started receiving private instant messages from people in the room. It took a bit of screening through the names to find Orrin. For some privacy and a bit of fun, I changed my name, age, location, and profession to Michelle, 27, Florida, and a professional gymnast and coach. Conversing with Orrin (38, male, Seattle) started out with very general topics such as the beginning question, “a/s/l?” Once he saw I was not a “kid” like the rest of the people in the chat room, responses became longer and more detailed but topics were still very general. After some time, Orrin became a bit random—out of the blue he mentioned that he had the “coolest pet” named Muffin who was a 17 year old cat—but was very respectful of the fact that I did not want to talk on another instant messenger program or tell him the city I lived in. When he joked around he used a lot of emoticons and eventually “spilled the beans” that his real name was Alen and not Orrin. He also shared similar interests in many of my made-up hobbies and never hesitated to add facts about himself that I never asked about. I had to eventually sign out of the chat room when he kept asking more detailed questions about my made-up profession. Of course he made sure to provide me with his e-mail address and ask if I would be online again tomorrow night before signing off, but accepted my answer of “not knowing where my life will take me come tomorrow.” That way, I did not have to personally worry about breaking a promise.

Although our conversation was fairly long, I do not feel as though I really got to know Alen. I did however, form a positive impression of him due to traits he portrayed that I appreciate in a man—lightheartedness, humor, and respect for me. This would most likely resemble Walther’s Social Information Processing Theory (SIP) because even though I chatted with him for over an hour, the depth of information I actually learned about him was minimal. In SIP, impression cues are put into a verbal channel by typing and reading thus taking more time to transmit information than face to face interactions.