I met my best friend, who lives an hour away, through her cousin, who went to my middle school. I met her the summer before I went into high school, and for the beginning of our relationship, we saw each other face to face rather infrequently. I met her in July of that summer, didn’t see her again until October, and so on. Thus, the real development of our relationship came online and, eventually, via the phone. In our case, the combination of McKenna’s “removal of gating features” and the visual anonymity factor of “identifiability,” combined and led to Wallace’s idea of “disinhibition effects.”
McKenna’s removal of gating features is the idea that, in face-to-face communication, physical attractiveness, status cues (such as race), shyness, and social anxiety act as gates to prevent particular people from developing relationships. Furthermore, McKenna asserts that in mediated forms of communication, these gates become less of a factor, if they even matter at all. This is particularly true in my situation. I’m very shy. Additionally, my friend was shy when we first met because she was not familiar with any of us who were her cousin’s friends, while we all knew each other, and she felt out of place. Thus, in our first face-to-face encounter, we barely said a word to each other. As she spoke to me online (at first when she was with her cousin, and then on her own screen name at home), the gating feature of shyness was removed and we were able to speak freely as if we knew each other well. We were both very comfortable with each other early in the relationship.
The removal of gating features coincided with our experience of the visual anonymity concept associated with McKenna’s identifiability factor. With a heightened awareness of myself, and a decreased in thinking about what my communication partner thought of me, I was able to disclose more information about myself, and speak with less restriction.
These two factors combined to create what Wallace refers to as disinhibition effects. Since we felt more at ease, due to the removal of gating features and the increase in visual anonymity, we increased our level of self-disclosure, allowing a fuller version of our personalities to surface, and letting us talk more in depth and cover a broader range of topics.
We quickly discovered what we had in common, what we could learn from each other’s differences, and how much we enjoyed conversing with one another. Our relationship quickly moved from the Internet to the phone, and now we visit each other as often as possible.
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/51-facilitation-of-sin.html
http://comm245red.blogspot.com/2007/09/5-option-2-youve-got-mail.html
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2 comments:
Dan,
your post has a very good layout of introducing which key factors you are applying and clearly defining them. I also liked how you were able to link McKenna’s factors to Wallace’s.
It’s interesting how the more you self-disclosed and the more your relationship developed, you were probably also able to find more common ground. Do you think that if you had met up with your cousin’s friend more frequently FtF that you guys would have eventually become good friends and that CMC simply assisted you guys in becoming friends faster? It’s strange, but I feel like some of the friends that I became better friends with online, I get along with them better in CMC than I do FtF. I guess we haven’t overcome the gating features yet.
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