The psychological Internet space that I entered for this assignment was a chat room called Teenspot.com. There were specific chat rooms for different topics of interest. The one that I entered was named Christian Faith. The chat room was fairly simple to sign-up for. All that was needed for this site was to enter basic information about name, age, gender, email, and at least one other email that they can email to about there site.
Once I entered the chat room I observed the conversation that was going on at the time. To my surprise, they were not really talking about the Christian faith. In particular there was this one person, emotional_babe, who was particularly inappropriate for a chat room supposedly dedicated to talking about the Christian faith. I decided to target that individual and proceeded to ask if this individual was a Christian and what the purpose of their comments was. Emotional_babe continued to type inappropriate comments that basically offended me, as a Christian. It did not seem like the person was taking anything seriously and made comments that seemed like they were intentionally made to offend me. At one point I asked emotional_babe if he/she was being serious with the comments that were being made. I frankly thought it was ridiculous.
My impression of emotional_babe was definitely negative. I thought he/she was offensive, rude, and just illogical. I think that the lack of context cues definitely played a role in just how fast and intense emotional_babe’s comments were. I could not tell how sarcastic or serious emotional_babe was being and since he/she did not express what emotions he/she was feeling, it was very difficult to get a read of how I should be taking the comments. Reduced social context cues definitely played a major role in my impression of emotional_babe. From the Hyperpersonal model, there were many factors that played in my experience. There were simple profiles that we were allowed to make before entering these chat rooms which falls under the selective self-presentation characteristic. I’m also guilty of using the over-attribution process in that I assumed this person was being an inconsiderate person that was saying things purposely to anger me. Those were the main attributes from the Hyperpersonal model that applied to this situation. Therefore I believe that my impression falls best under the category of the Hyperpersonal Model.
1 comment:
Hi Grace, your post makes me think of an often asked question with regards to communicative people in chat rooms: who are these people? The type of internet denizen you encountered is sometimes known as “troll”; or users who just try to attack or harass others without a logical motivation. And do we tend to form very vivid impressions of these people based on the hyperpersonal approach, or do we think of them as a faceless menace via reduced social-context clues?
You state that your impression falls under the hyperpersonal model. I think that this is the case because you spent an extended period of time forcing yourself to converse with this person, while if you allowed the full extent of your conversation to remain in the chat room you might have brushed this person off and not developed a real opinion of her because your entire interaction would have been her illogical, rude comments. Maybe next time include some snippets of your conversation to allow the reader to develop an impression of your partner as well, because I am certainly curious as to why someone would waste their time being offensive to an innocent stranger in a personal messaging scenario.
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