For my third assignment, I decided to go with Option 1, and I suspect that I am in the minority. It was a fun and entertaining experience, and of course, it was all done in the name of science!
Chat service used for this assignment was ICQ.com and I entered the chat rooms at around 8:30 PM. Being male, my identity switch involved taking on the role of a female. I chose to experiment with the identity 'sexy_samantha_9.' With samantha, I visited the Romance Room and the 40+ Room.
The 'samantha' character is 19 years old from New York City. She is oblivious to the perils of the online chat world, arriving in the room completely innocent and taken back by the onslaught of sexual deviance that greets her. samantha's self presentation tactics included self-descriptions of herself through ASL, her going to college for interior design, and her inexperience with the internet; attitude expression manifested in frustrated and angry responses to the males in the chat rooms who were sexually aggressive; and social associations were expressed in the ease of talking with other females and when samantha would no longer speak to those who rubbed her the wrong way.
In the Romance room, I found that it was hard to hold a productive conversation with anyone, since it would eventually boil down to "do u have pix?" or "call me baby!" I would enter the room with "hi, what’s up" and would repeatedly use the language and conversational style of a stereotypical, middle-class, innocent young girl. I noticed repeated use of "like" and "whatever" in samantha’s language.
In my role playing, samantha was very concerned with maintaining her 'ought self' and in struggling toward her 'ideal self' which both dictated that she be appalled at the sexually overt nature of the other chatters, and yet remain polite and 'above the situation'. Her 'true self,' however, revealed her frustration with the others, but also a hint of curiosity, as she (or maybe I) began to entertain some of the private messages that had been flooding in, just for laughs.
After leaving the Romance room, I carried the experiment into the 40+ Room, to see if I would find similar results. Although I received less sexual attention, there was still a little, especially after I sent my ASL information. The majority of chatters, however, was respectful of my age and sexuality and, overall, seemed to exhibit the minimum self-control that one would expect of a chat room for mature audiences. In this environment, samantha felt much more comfortable and was better able to adhere to the ought and ideal selves, and in fact, even a bit of her true self began to show itself, since she allowed her defenses to lower as she began making friends in the room.
Comment 1
2 comments:
RJ,
Great job staying in character! It seems like you really tried to stay Samantha throughout, even when analyzing the experience. I'll be it's also interesting for guys to see how mnuch more girls are solicited in chat rooms-- I'm thinking it's really due mostly to the fact that there are so many more men looking for a... good time... and a lot of the girls who go on chat rooms have the same interests. I'm kind of wondering why you chose to go into the 40+ and Romance rooms. Chances are you weren't going to find much meaningful conversation in the romance room! It is interesting though that "Samantha" was able to make more friends in the 40+ room becuase I think as humans our natural tendency to believe people would make us feel more comfortable among other people who aren't likely to be as lewd. In all reality, everyone in that chat room could have been our age or younger and we wouldn't have known the difference. Maybe it was just people who didn't want perverted conversations and thought hiding behind that age barrier would do the trick. It's an interesting idea, anyway. Great job.
September 12, 2007 5:51 PM
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