Assignment 2

I spoke for about twenty minutes with “a_dierham” (name changed to protect identity) via private messaging on Meebo. Meebo is an AJAX based service that mimics instant messengers and chats and even allows you to access your chat client based accounts from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ. I first met a_dierham in a chat for 20+ Adults on meebo. She was the first to reply to my “hello” in the group chat and I sent her a private message to interact with her one on one.

At this point, I had already formed my first impression of her after observably a short series to posts on the general chat. Firstly, I figured she was somewhat intelligent and clearly extroversive in the manner in which she was conversing with the chat group. She spoke with good grammar and sentence structures and was almost acting as a mediating / moderator within the chat. I had also pegged her as a male given her rather androgynous screen name and the fact that the majority of the chat members were men. Clearly, I was mistaken.

As we began chatting, and I asked a_dierham how she was doing, she replied “bored - another few hours of work, then my bf comes to pick me up.” This statement quickly lead me to two conclusions: first on her job / role, she clearly has a desk job which affords her the opportunity to waste some time online and secondly, in regards to her openness I concluded that she is a wary of new contacts using her boyfriend as a shield from unwanted solicitors. I then asked her what it was she for work and she said “hotel worker.” Which to mean seemed again guarded in that she was either a bit embarrassed about her job or unwilling to fully share. As we continued to chat and I asked some probing questions to find out more about her, I affirmed my belief she was intelligent as she waxed on a bit about her life as a Hotel Front Desk employee in the Orlando area. Somewhere along the line I had pegged her to be about 25 or 26 (I never found out for sure). Overall, she seemed quite controlled in the situation stating she occasionally visited chats when bored at work and was glad to have a decent conversation without having to “baby-sit or fend off creeps” and also very agreeable by her use of smiley faces in response to statements I made about myself or conjectures on things she had said.

The impression I had formed of a_dierham fell into line with a lot of the theories discussed in class. While I had found her to be an agreeable and intelligent conversationalist and I knew a little of her life as a Hotel Employee with a boyfriend, I could provide very little else in terms of describing her. This is representative of the Social Presence Theory. Further, I did find myself to have a somewhat negative impression of her given the information she had provided to me about her job in that I assumed she probably didn’t have a college degree or at least not a good one. This observation coincides with the theories in the Cues Filtered Out (CFO) and Reduced Social Context Cues theories which resolve that CMC will lead to underdeveloped and sometimes negative impressions.

Overall, I believe that the development of my impression of a_dierham is most reflective of the Hyperpersonal Model. Firstly, in counterargument to Social Information Processing (SIP), I had felt myself making broad generalizations about a_dierham’s gender, intelligence, and extrovertiveness well before I had even spoken a word to her just by observing her in the general chat. And, while I had admitted some negative impressions relating the CFO model, overall I had found a_dierham a very capable and likable individual. That said, I believe the intensity of revere I held for her intelligence was largely undue given the length of our conversation. This exaggeration of impressions falls in line with the Hyperpersonal Model. Further, I found myself stretching what I knew about her to make judgments about other parts of her life (her education for instance).