Assignment 2

Finding a chat room that isn’t saturated with requests to “share pics” or “chat with hot 17/m” is like finding a college student who doesn’t use Facebook. However, with a little perseverance, I managed to find a fairly innocuous chat room in which to make a new e-friend. In MySpace’s Alternative Music room, I watched as people with fashionably cryptic usernames chatted about nothing very important. When the conversation turned to siblings, I added that I was an only child. One girl commented that she was also an only child, noting that we were “ossm.” I seized the opportunity to get to know this fellow sibling-free alternative music listener and asked who her favorite bands were, sparking a conversation. By virtue of her pink font and presence in this particular chat room, I guessed that she was probably in high school. My guess was confirmed when I looked at her profile, which told me that she was a 16-year-old from the United Kingdom.

After chatting with this girl for about twenty minutes and simultaneously scanning her profile, which contained pictures and lists of her favorite things, I thought I had a pretty good grip on her personality. Through selective self-presentation she projected the image of an intelligent, entertainment-savvy adolescent prone to brooding. While her peers might have seen a hip girl who knew something they didn’t, her numerous photographic self-portraits and efforts to shirk conformity in all the usual ways struck me as pretentious. I didn’t hold this against her, though; we’ve all been sixteen and she seemed like a nice person.

Through chatting with her, I felt I had good reason to think she was agreeable, conscientious, and a bit introverted, which leads me to believe that I might not have found her attempts to appear superficially edgy quite as salient had we interacted face-to-face. Here, the hyperpersonal model scores a point; her selective self-presentation led me to form a more intense impression of her personality than I would have in a “real world” context, even though this intense impression was tempered by my own recognition of it possibly being an unfair assessment. The hyperpersonal model also accounts for how easily I pigeonholed her. Without enough first-hand interaction from which to glean information about her as an individual, I lumped my new friend into a category I formed sometime in high school. Since I had friends who presented themselves online in similar ways when we were sixteen, I assumed that she shared certain features with them, including mild neuroticism and a fairly high degree of openness. The hyperpersonal model calls this tendency to stereotype “overattribution processes.” I think behavioral confirmation, another feature of the hyperpersonal model, was also an important aspect of my interaction. Because I showed appreciation for her taste in music, she may have unconsciously presented a slightly more confident version of herself, helping to perpetuate my impression of her as a discerning listener. As for the developmental aspect of the hyperpersonal model, I think I would have been able to form a more comprehensive view of her personality if we chatted longer and more often. However, I think the breadth of my representation was enhanced by her profile, which the hyperpersonal model does not seem to account for. Though I have no way of knowing whether my impressions would have been dulled in a face-to-face interaction, there is reason to believe that the factors which make up the hyperpersonal model would lead to a more extreme online assessment of her personality. Overall, my impression of alternative music girl seems to be most consistent with this model’s predictions.