I was abroad last semester in Australia, and due to different mediated forms of communication I am sure the experience is much different than it was 20 years ago. Looking back, I realize that McKenna's factors of relationship facilitation all came into play at the time and now, especially now that I am halfway around the world from people I got to spend so much time with and know so well. Through Facebook in particular McKenna's factors, specifically getting the goods and connecting to similar others, helped me and the other international students figure out what we had in common with who and it also facilitated how to keep in touch.
First and foremost, since I did not plan my trip abroad with any of my friends, once I found out who was going abroad from here I may or may not have done a little facebook stalking. Luckily no one had their security settings too high because I got to look at their profiles and see one of them was actually good friends growing up with one of my good friends here at school, it was just weird we had never met. This led to us getting our friend to facilitate a meeting at the end of fall semester and let us keep in touch during the winter break before heading abroad.
Once we got abroad, by keeping in touch over winter break we had already figured out we had a lot in common (connecting to similar others), so now we had a foundation heading to a completely foreign country and having to meet new people. Early on there were a lot of international student activities and events for the international students to meet each other, so of course I was meeting a lot of new faces in a short amount of time. This interaction was way easier when someone I had just met would friend me, or I’d be on facebook and I’d look at the profile of some I just met. Getting the goods was pretty key in seeing who I would keep in touch with after meeting them that first week. Since there were so many international students and so few of us lived on campus (I was one of the lucky ones), I knew I was going to have my on campus friends and it wouldn’t be a problem due to proximity, but as to who I kept in touch with off campus had as much to do with the first impressions I got from the brief interactions at the bars where we’d meet at functions as with the next impressions I got from people looking at their facebook accounts and comparing interests. Coincidently, the people I keep most in touch with are either the ones I have the most shared interests with or the ones with the funniest profiles. There I go again, connecting to similar others.
1 comment:
Hi Carlos, very relevant post, as I imagine online relationships would play a major role in forming relationships when studying abroad. You really do relate the relationship forming process to most of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors. Removal of gating features enabled you to form that first friendship, your new friends felt closer to you because of easy identifiably (thank you, Facebook), you got the goods to see who you wanted to remain close to, and you remark how your friends turned out to be the ones with similar interests. What I am really curious about is whether it really is a coincidence that you “kept most in touch with … either the ones [you] have the most shared interests with or the ones with the funniest profiles”. Could it be that you adopted the hyperpersonal model towards those people where you focused more on their online personas? Or possibly you activated the confirmation bias and acted more friendly to those people with favorable Facebook profiles? Either way, interesting psychological functions are going on.
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