For this assignment, I posed as a 30 year old woman who was new to the internet. I entered an online chat room posing as this woman who has 2 children and a husband who has passed away. I appeared to be somewhat out of place in a chat room full of teens chatting away with surprising typing abilities and an excellent understanding of internet rhetoric. Using selective self-presentation from the view of a 30 year old internet chat room neophyte’s point-of-view was quite an interesting ordeal.
I figured that the age I portrayed would not seem too old, just a little internet illiterate. However, I was quite mistaken. It was practically like these users had never seen an online persona over the age of 20 in their lives. I got all different types of reactions, everything from laughing at my non-internet form of chatting to intriguing inquiries as to why I was in the chat room, and about my children and life. I observed that simply by using a slightly different vocabulary and sense of grammar than I would normally in such a situation, the ease at which I got them to believe my story was remarkable. I found that as I slipped more and more into the role, I began to see how unconscious selective self presentation might take place in another person as they take on an internet persona. The users in the chat room that did respond to my messages where surprisingly into this random conversation with a “30 year old woman.” The ability to portray oneself however one wishes to be perceived on the internet allows for us to become individuals and grab the attention of the chat at will.
As the discussion went on I found myself wondering how the persona I was presenting myself as would react to the various messages being sent in “her” direction were I actually her. It also made me wonder as to the type of person that might actually steal or fabricate identities online, and for what purpose they might do so. Plus, how different is fabricating an identity from just a more conscious form of self-presentation? Overall, I wondered as to the possibilities of a lack of verbal cues, and how many people really do remake themselves online because they are that unsatisfied with themselves. It provides an easy method for those who wish to be someone else.
3 comments:
Jeff, it seems to me from the way you describe your experience that as time went on you began to actually subconsciously behave like a thirty year old woman rather than carefully craft out lies in order to manage that identity. I wonder if you think that your interaction was consistent with the behavioral confirmation Walther describes in his hyperpersonal model, in that because the people that you were talking to actually bought into your conjured identity, you began to act less like your true self and more like a mid-age widow. Obviously that was your goal from the get-go, and so you purposefully modified and managed that impression. However, it would be very interesting if we could tell whether or not over time those conscience signals you used to impression manage were combined with implicit unconscience signals that were totally involuntary.
Hi Jeff. Your blog was very interesting, and I cannot imagine being older and not able to fully communicate over the Internet. I was trying to iChat with my parents today and I had to explain every step of the connection process for them to actually video chat with me. I definitely think your experience goes back to the hyperpersonal model. Specifically, your experience relates most to the behavior-confirmation aspect of the model. If someone acted towards you as a 30-year-old woman and thought of you as 30-year-old women, you would actually act more and more like a 30-year-old woman. This seems to be the case with your experience.
Hey Jeffrey, first of all, let me say that I think its very interesting that you managed to steal the attention of everyone in the room you were in. I also found their reactions interesting which made me think of how I would've reacted. Also, I wonder if maybe there were other people in there, who like you, were pretending to be someone they weren't and 30 was closer to their actual age. Nonetheless, I think that you questions at the end are really interesting and I am curious to find out more about whether you enjoyed pretending to be someone you weren't. Do you think that being unsatisfied with yourself leads people to not only change genders but age as well? If so, how do you think they decide how old/young they want to be and based on what factors? I definitely liked how you pretended to be "internet illiterate," I used the same tactic!
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