5! Growing Closer or Apart with High School Friends?

After I arrived at college, my interactions with close friends back at home changed drastically. While these relationships once consisted of daily face-to-face and telephone conversations, they now have been relegated to the world of AOL Instant Messaging and Facebook.

For this exercise, I am going to analyze my relationship with one of my close high school friends. While we used to interact face-to-face on a daily basis in high school, we now talk online using AOL Instant Messenger or Facebook approximately once or twice per week. Wallace has outlined a series of four factors (physical attractiveness, proximity, common grounds, and disinhibiton), which relate to how we form and maintain relationships online. I am going to analyze this particular relationship using two of these four factors: disinhibition and proximity.

Disinhibition: Disinhibition refers to how willing we are to self-disclose in our relationship. If someone is very disinhibited, he would not be willing to reveal personal information. Wallace predicts that increased self-disclosure will lead to increased relationship development. According to Jonison (2001), online communication affords us the benefit of visual anonymity, which means that we are invisible to others (in most circumstances) while we communicate. This leads to both increased private self-awareness and decreased public self-awareness, resulting in increased self-disclosure.

I find Jonison’s predictions to be extremely relevant to my relationship with my friend in that we are much more personal online that in a face-to-face setting. When communicating via IM I have increased private self-awareness, which means I am able to sit in my room privately and therefore more seriously contemplate my thoughts. Because I am more aware of my inner self, I am able to disclose much more personal information to my friend. Furthermore, I have decreased public self-awareness, which means that I am less cognizant of how others (including my friend) view me from an outside perspective. Therefore, I feel less self-conscious and more willing to share my feelings and thoughts.

Proximity: Proximity refers to how frequently we are exposed to someone. Online this flows from intersectional frequency. Wallace’s prediction is that increased proximity will result in increased relationship development. I too find this to be relevant to the particular relationship about which I am writing. One reason that my friend and I have grown closer since coming to college is that we are both online on AIM very frequently. Therefore, we are constantly exposed to each other, resulting in familiarity and relationship development. In contrast, I have grown apart from friends who rarely come online, and I have found that I am less likely to IM them when they actually do. In contrast, because I see this particular friend’s screen name constantly on my buddy list, she is very familiar, and I am highly likely to IM her frequently

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