11 Leaving Virtuality

The summer before freshman year, Cornell provided incoming students with the names of their future roommates. Having already activated a Facebook account by the time my roommate assignment arrived, it was easy for me to take the first step in getting to know the girl with whom I’d soon share a recycling bin. Once we were Facebook friends, I was able to see her profile, which prompted me to quickly form a fairly exaggerated impression. Her profile told me that she loved classic rock, exclamation points, and working out. Taken together, her interests seemed to indicate that my future roommate was energetic and very athletic. While most people don’t view physical fitness as a character flaw, I was a little worried that we would have trouble relating to each other, given my lack of athletic competence and minimal interest in sports. I gained further information when she sent me a Facebook message. From the message, I surmised that she was friendly, though the letter-like format of her note led me to think she might be a little less easy-going and fun than I had previously assumed. We exchanged messages for a week and finally met on move-in day.

When I met my roommate for the first time in person, she was very friendly and I immediately felt comfortable talking to her. My prior sense that she might be a little too tightly-wound yielded to an updated impression of her as being a fun, spontaneous person. Furthermore, it seemed that her love of physical activity would not get in the way of us developing a friendship; we had other things in common. Because my impression of my roommate became more positive once I met her, my experience seems most consistent with Uncertainty Reduction Theory. This theory states that as we gain more information about a person, we come to like them better. While my online-based impressions led me to feel uncertain that we would become friends, my real-world social interactions with her allowed me to gain a better appreciation for her personality and to form a positive impression.

Ramirez and Wang have shown that in-person meetings following short-term online interactions tend to be evaluated positively and also tend to reduce uncertainty. Since my online interactions with my roommate were brief (one week), my experience further bolsters Ramirez and Wang’s findings. My limited online interactions were insufficient in forming a realistic impression. However, this impression became much more positive and less equivocal once social interactions were available to me.