Bush debates Kerry, insult-style. Southerners go up north and have a comedic culture clash with a Northerner. One guy finds friendship—and more--at Applebee’s. What do all of these have in common? They were all short movies I made with one group of close family friends. Although I only “see” these “actors” once a year, CMC helps facilitate manageable relationships with them, both “professional” and as good friends of the family. McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors have played an integral part to both pre-production and post-production as we produce one short movie per year at each “reunion.” This long-distance relationship required both connecting to similar others and removal of gating features for a smooth operation. Connecting to similar others is when CMC makes it easier to communicate with people who have similar interests, no matter where they are physically. Through social networking and instant messaging, we discovered some common ground: we all enjoyed acting and producing movies, mostly through improvising topics the coming weeks (and even the day of!) before our big production. Eventually we could comfortably talk about our past movies together, other movies I have made, and about “the next big day” of production fun. After the most recent movie was made this past August, CMC (especially IM and Facebook) helped me to keep in touch with all our friends, whether they were in college, in their first job, or still in grade school because we could all engage in a synchronous chat or asynchronous “bouncing” of ideas with each other. CMC also helped me to send out a pre-release of the movie to each actor and elicit their textual feedback. Connecting to similar others through common ground, social networking, and across time and space has helped me to maintain a good relationship with “the acting family.”
Removal of gating features states that gates such as physical attractiveness, cues like race or disability, and shyness or social anxiety are either removed or made less apparent in computer-mediated communication. A few of the younger (under 12) family members who were too young to participate in previous movies were reticent to “give it a try” this time. With the gating features of their age and potential shyness removed, they could freely suggest ideas and give feedback about our past movies and make plot suggestions for our most recent one. Eventually I helped persuade them to assume an identity and refine their character and the plot as actors this time around. Since they were so far away from me, the CMC environment was good for talking and sharing user-generated media with them, as we criticized my production and maintained our long-distance relationship.
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Hi Joe!
As someone who had worked frequently with people I have never met over the Internet, I can definitely agree on the need for the removal of gating features. When collaborating on a group project over CMC, we often found it necessary to be more frank than we would have been in real life. Since it is difficult to express many implicit expressions over CMC, particularly complex ones such as hidden sarcasm and indirect disapproval, we had more incentives to drop the formality and set aside many gating components early on.
As for common grounds, I actually had the opposite experience as you. When I worked with someone overseas, we found out that we were virtually polar opposite in nearly every preference. However, since the whole ordeal was done through the web, it was easy to sustain an impersonal transaction of information and advise. If we were to work together in person, I think we would have gotten on each other's nerves quite often.
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