“One thing about the Net is people can't physically see you, but they can figure out what and who you are as that is hard to hide if you talk for any length of time.”
Tom’s behavior is partially deceptive, in that he selectively presented himself by not revealing his height. However, this lack of information sent a signal to his female viewers as a form of assessment signal deception. The women responded to the potential deception by sending emails asking about Tom’s height. This instance of deception detection emerged from a lack of information, relative to most other profiles that listed height. Not seeing such a standard assessment signal sent a red flag to the viewers that Tom had something to hide. Thus, the formalities of the online dating world mediated deception detection rather than directed verbal communication online, as discussed in class.
Tom’s narrative most directly supports McKenna’s removal of gating features relationship facilitation factors. Tom’s height may have deterred many women from getting to know him in the physical world, but Tom was able to shroud his height online and forego this hurdle. Although photographs make it difficult to hide physical flaws, height is indiscernible for most photographs (not taken at the police station), and can easily slip through the cracks of characteristics women would notice. Tom was also able to ‘get the goods,’ as per McKenna’s facilitation factors by filtering out the shallow women who were concerned with his height. Tom knew the women he was contacting weren’t superficial enough to inspect his profile and probe him about his height via email. This is a valuable trait for Tom to know, and evinces one of the many ways in which online communication can reveal unexpected and surprisingly detailed information about a person.
Knowing Tom’s marriage has lasted for five years, he was most likely looking for a long-term relationship in his online search. Gibbs, Ellison, & Heino help explain how his preference matches his self-disclosure techniques of forming deep, meaningful conversation for eight months online. He utilized the Internet to shroud his physical weakness in order to get to know his wife before meeting her face to face. After forming such a close bond with his significant other, physical appearance became the least of their concerns. Tom admits he’ll never be the most attractive or wealthy man, but he’s thankful for the lasting relationship he found online, and encourages more people to utilize the Internet for finding genuine, long-lasting relationships over superficial ones initiated by physical attraction.
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3 comments:
Nice analysis Steve.
I must admit, I'm a little confused by Tom's choice to not include his height. If it honestly was to help weed out shallow women, then why didn't he just include his height and let the women that it didn't phase contact him? Perhaps Tom fell into the classic pattern of Selective Self-Presentation more than he would like to admit. I don't see how displaying his height would have hurt him. In fact, he would have been able to avoid turning down all of the shallow women!
First of all...wow, I did not know that there was an Online Dating Magazine! This article was very interesting, and you did a great job of relating it back to theory. I think what Tom did was actually pretty smart though. It allowed him to filter out these women who were so concerned with his height. I don't believe it was deceptive, but he just decided to omit this detail in order to meet genuine women, with the intention of having a long term relationship. As you said, there was a removal of gating features, and what he would encounter in real life (women being turned off by his height) was avoided. In this case, all worked out well in the end, and it was interesting to see how this was facilitated by features of internet communication.
Hey Steve,
Great post - it was very well written and analyzed! It is interesting how Tom didn’t just turn to online deception as many often do on Internet profiles, and list his height as a few inches above his real height. We talked about this last week, how men often tend to lie about their height by a few inches in online profiles, but it’s interesting to know that some people like Tom prefer to hide the information altogether rather than lie about it. I suppose Walther anticipates this kind of behavior in the Social Information Processing Theory, which you mentioned in the post. As Tom anticipated a long-term relationship with someone, he strategically self-disclosed information about himself that had a positive bias, while maintaining a high degree of truthful self-presentation. Walther’s 6th Hypothesis models this kind of situation by explaining that although honesty is inversely related to self-presentation success, the more positive the self-disclosure, the higher the probability of SP success, which seems to be the case here. Nevertheless, it’s good to hear that everything worked out well for Tom, and that his online self-presentation strategy was successful.
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