For this assignment I went into the same chat room as I did for assignment 2, but this time I was disguised as an 18 year old female under the name “Pigtails23”. I wanted a name that would suggest being a teenage female. When I joined the chat I greeted everyone and this time, I got a lot more responses. One person asked me “asl” and when I responded “18/f/boston” I immediately received 8 private messages, all from guys. I was expecting a lot of attention, but this was more than I had imagined.
Not surprisingly, most of the chats basically followed the same path. The guy would ask me what I looked like. I responded trying to describe a fairly attractive female – “blonde, blue eyes, 5 foot 2”. Shortly after that, the guy would ask me if I had msn, presumably for video chatting. I replied “no” and the conversation usually ended. Almost everyone was online interested in video chatting with an attractive female. There was one guy who seemed interested in chatting with me because he was also from Boston, but our chat never progressed very far.
While chatting online, I tried to talk in a way that would make me seem like an 18 year old girl who used chat rooms a lot. I used common slang such as “r” instead of “are” and “u” instead of “you” and I tried to use a lot of smileys. In the end, it seemed that I probably seemed more like a dits or a girl who was looking to video chat with a guy. Because this was an online chat, I didn’t have any nonverbal behaviors to use to help create an image of myself so I had to only use the messages I sent. If I was chatting face to face I would have been able to use other channels but it would have been impossible to pretend I was someone else. The anonymity that the Internet provides is so great that it almost encourages disguising oneself.
The whole experience was very disturbing because it bothers me to know that all these guys weren’t interested with meeting someone new to make a friend, they only wanted to video chat with an attractive girl. It took some effort to actually chat with these guys and make attempts at starting a conversation, even though they all failed.
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Your experience is fairly representative of why many girls choose not to participate in random chat rooms. However, I wish you had agreed to video chat with at least one of the male chatters to reciprocate the creepiness at the sight of a college-aged male on the screen.
I'm interested in how much of your impression management involved your perception of the way in which more attractive female chatters communicate as opposed to less attractive chatters. You wrote that you used lingo to seem well-adversed with the chat room world; would this have changed if you were pretending to be a less attractive female? Also, do you connect using online terms such as "ur" or "lol" are associated more with online experience or maturity?
Matt,
I'm glad someone else also did a gender switch experiment. Yours differed greatly from mine, but I can still see the ubiquitous “a/s/l” stereotype and the readiness of people willing to accept any claims if it sounds attractive enough. The anonymity is of course the primary veil that covers your true identity, and I’m glad you mentioned all the other seemingly minor aspects such as abbreviating words and the rampant use of smilies. Your experience simply further confirms the different norms in a psychological space, where nonverbal cues are often taken as truth. It may also be true that the people in the chat room were simply too apathetic to doubt most claims, unless they are utterly unbelievable. Either way, the use of self-presentation tactics obvious varies greatly from CMC to FtF.
Although, as you mentioned that he left as soon as you declined to video chat, we can see that in some cases/psychological spaces, pure conventional CMC of text is no longer sufficient. While he may be willing to accept the fact that you are a female even without pictures and videos, he still desires a more personal, almost FtF communication (as video chat is likely the closest method to FtF that we have available with our technology). Perhaps he wanted to get more “intimate,” or he just wanted further confirmation, but regardless of his motives it is nonetheless clear that impression management can only carry a deception so far.
Hey Matt,
I enjoyed reading your post because it reminded me of almost every chatroom experience I’ve had. I also found it interesting that you chose to portray a ditz. To me, this seems like a logical choice. The intellectual demographic seems to be underrepresented in chatrooms, or at least the chatrooms I’ve visited during the last two weeks. This probably has less to do with the medium itself than the self-proclaimed themes of these chatrooms. It’s also interesting that your use of “u” and smileys connoted both cyber-savvy and a certain degree of immaturity. By portraying a fairly prototypical and competent user of this online space, you gave the impression of a girl interested in little more than the hormone-driven banter chatrooms are known for. Why is it that the chatroom continues to primarily serve this community? For some reason, the mainstream public seems to view chatrooms as inferior forms of communication for most tasks, which might shed light on the validity of some of the theories we’ve talked about.
Matt, I liked your post. I did a gender switch also but I did it for assignment 2 when nobody would talk to me as a guy. However, I found that as soon as I switched to a girl (with a girl’s screenname) I started getting messages from all different kinds of guys including a couple that were so creepy that I uninstalled the chat program and decided not to do it again for this assignment.
I feel that in many cases we go into chats with a CFO perspective. I had actually assumed that everyone I met online would be creepy but I did end up talking to a couple people who in the short time that I talked to them seemed to just want to make a friend. It is important to remember that while there are a lot of weird people in chat rooms, there are still plenty that are using the media for productive purposes.
I had an extremely similar experience to you for assignment 2. I went into a chat room describing myself as a 22 year old, attractive female from New York. I got so many private chat requests the moment I entered the chat room, and almost every single one of them, after asking me a/s/l and to describe myself, asked me to send them a picture or video chat with them. After this awful, chauvinistic experience, I would never feel comfortable going into a chat room with my real identity on display.
I’m sure this experience was quite enlightening for you – it really helps show how partial anonymity online can have an effect on possibly normal individuals (especially males…at least in the case of chat rooms).
Awesome post!
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