For this assignment, I decided to enter a singles chat room because I was curious to see if people actually participated in these rooms in the hopes of meeting people whom they would like to date. Initially, I entered a large room with about 75 people participating at the same time. I found this room to be extremely hard to follow, since new messages were posted at such a rapid pace. Most of the correspondence consisted of someone posting messages that would state the kind of person they were trying to meet and how to contact them through a one on one chatting service. The other messages seemed to be bots, or advertisements that would periodically send the same message to the room with a link to a pornographic website. I started to ask if anyone was actually interested in chatting and I got a response from someone whom I assumed to be female. We chatted back and forth for about five minutes despite the messages of the other people. Finally, she stopped responding so I went to another chat room called “the bar” with only 7 people in it.
I enjoyed the conversation I had in “the bar” far more than the one that I had in the larger chat room. When I entered the room, I was immediately greeted by someone named “la bella vita.” “la bella vita” and I chatted for about 45 minutes about nothing in particular. The conversation started out by her greeting me, but then being rude to me when I didn’t know what The Hills was. Once she started to be rude to me, I took her attitude to be an open invitation to say whatever I wanted to her. I started to flirt with her very intensely while she tried to shut me down. I pretended not to get the hint and just continued to flirt until she finally left the chat room. Our conversation was the only consistent one in the chat room so the other people in the chat would comment on our responses to each other.
I believe that my impression of “la bella vita” was more in line with the CFO prediction than with SIP or HYPERPERSONAL. The fact that I only chatted with “la bella vita” for one session rules out SIP for me. While I was typing my responses to “la bella vita”, I wasn’t really concerned about what kind of person she would think I was as much as I was concerned about saying something funny to make her say something funny back, which rules out HYPERPERSONAL. Without those sarcastic tones and facial expressions, it was hard to take anything that she said seriously. The emoticons helped me realize when she was being sarcastic but, for the most part, they made me even more confused since she used them so generously. When I finished chatting with “la bella vita”, I realized that my impression of her had nothing really to do with what she said to me but everything else. The fact that she was so engaged in an online chat room made me think that she was somewhat of a recluse. Her icon of a beautiful woman’s body led me to believe that she was probably a rather physically unattractive person in reality, which I based solely on past facebook experiences. Her knowledge of the emoticons and all the little chatting acronyms led me to believe that she was someone who spent plenty of time in such chat rooms talking to strangers. Despite all of these factor that might lead me to believe that she might be a recluse who continually talks to strangers on the internet, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was just the complete opposite. Maybe she was someone who enjoyed coming in to chat rooms and being funny and messing around with the people who did visit them on a regular basis. After our chat session was over, I realized I really had no idea who “la bella vita” was.
1 comment:
Mike,
It seems like you had an interesting experience with "la bella vita." I had a similar experience in that with my target I also felt the open invitation to say whatever I wanted to my target after being rude.
I believe that due to the reduced social context cues, you might have focused most of your time on her word choices as well as the emotion icons she used. As a result, because these cues can only help develop one's opinions to a certain extent, it seemed to be difficult to make a generalized opinion about your target. I found that it was difficult for me as well. In other words, it was hard to get a read, or put a finger on your target.
I believe that because of these limited cues, it was easier for you, when you figured out you wanted to "flirt" with the target even though "she" was being sarcastic, to do so. As talked about in class, early research for the CFO perspective showed that impressions of others online were cooler and more task-oriented. Even though this might be a stretch, I feel as if your "task" was to flirt with your target and essentially irritate "her."
It seemed like it was an interesting experience and it was a successful encounter for this assignment.
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