Assignment 11: Back To Reality

When I signed up for Facebook, I experienced the barrage of friend requests that all soon-to-be Cornellians received in the months before school started. While I did not make much contact with most of these people beyond the initial friend request, there were a few who I exchanged a number of wall posts with. Within that group, there were some people who I began talking to through IM.

I remember one girl who I talked to often. We spoke about making plans in the future and how much we would hang out once we were at Cornell. Thus we spent the first few months of our relationship, getting to know each other and talking about a future friendship, online.

For whatever reason, neither of us made a huge effort to meet once we got on campus and it was a week or so before I ran into her unexpectedly. Our encounter was brief and we haven’t spoken since.

I think this brings another variable into account that Ramirez and Wang failed to address: time between last online contact and first face-to-face encounter. They did mention time between modality switch (if I read correctly there was a week between the online task and the face-to-face task), but they did not test it as a variable.

I wonder what effect that time gap had on the relationship between my Facebook friend and me. If we had been talking online the night before we left for school, and then planned to meet up the next day, would we have remained close? If there had been even more time in between our mode switch, would we have had more to talk about in our first FtF encounter? We could have lamented about how we had failed to keep in touch, and told each other about the start of the semester.

Regardless of this ignored variable, I think my experience was in line with Ramirez and Wang’s findings. There was more of violation of expectancy since we had known each other online for four or five months. When we talked online it was just us two, but when we met at school for the first time we were with friends and couldn’t just stop and talk to each other. This violated what we expected our relationship to be, and I think ultimately caused the rapid decline of our relationship. It seems quite apparent that modality switches can really impact a relationship.


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