Assignment 5, Option 1

My girlfriend and I have been dating since our senior years in high school. Though a mutual friend introduced us to each other, we text-messaged each other frequently in the weeks leading up to our first official date. Though this form of mediated-communication-technology, my girlfriend and I expedited the beginning stages of our relationship. Referring to McKenna’s Relationship Facilitation Factors, my girlfriend and I both benefited from interactional control and removal of gating features; and, in light of Wallace’s research on interpersonal attraction, we engaged in Disinhibition Effects understood by the Hyperpersonal Model.
Through the use of text-messaging and later Instant Messages, my girlfriend and I selectively managed our self-presentations. In what McKenna phrases “interactional control,” we dwelled on our impression management through the use of cognitive re-allocation, behavioral confirmation, and other parts of the Hyperpersonal Model. Additionally, through the use of text-messages and instant messages, we benefited from what Mckenna calls the “Removal of Gating Features.” Though we had already met each other in a face-to-face situation, we were still getting to know each other, and thus fully-absorbed in our respective self-presentations. As such, we benefited from mediated forms of communication, because it enabled us to worry less about our physical attractiveness, and focus more on the aspects of our self-presentations that we could control, such as humor and suaveness. Given at the time of our courtship, Facebook was not a widely used networking tool, my girlfriend and I could not benefit from what McKenna phrases, “Getting the Goods,” which is retrieving information about each other prior to meeting in a face-to-face interaction. Regardless, through the use of mediated-communication, we ultimately benefited greatly from interactional control and removal of gating features. Additionally, in what Wallace phrases, “Disinhibition Effects,” my girlfriend and I were more confident, and ultimately less inhibited through the use of mediated-communication. Using many of the Hyperpersonal processes, such as re-allocation of cognitive resources and selective self-presentation, we said things we perhaps would not have said in a face-to-face situation, which ultimately expedited our relationship.
Since senior year, my girlfriend and I have been in a long-distance relationship, as we go to colleges in different states. With hardly any face-to-face interaction, excluding breaks and summers, we have relied on various forms of mediated communication. Though we both decided to refrain from the use of video conferencing, thinking that it would be too frustrating, we have used virtually every other communication medium available. Talking on the phone, text messaging, writing e-mails, and occasionally writing letters, we continue to control our interactions, and “remove gate-features,” but not nearly as much as we did when we were beginning our relationship. This is definitely due to the facts that we are more comfortable with each other, and in a more mature relationship than ever before.