When I went away to college a lot of the relationships I had with people back home changed. I’d been lucky enough that no one I was that close to had moved away when I was a kid, so before I left for school I’d never really had to deal with having a relationship shift from an everyday, face-to-face thing to a distant, CMC and phone relationship. One relationship that was particularly difficult for me to adjust to was with my best friend Emily, who goes to the college in Illinois. Since high school, our relationship has changed a lot, but mostly for the better. During our freshmen year in college, we talked on the phone, on AIM, and through Facebook. I evaluated our relationship through two of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors of which there are five: identifiability, removal of gating features, interactional control, connecting to similar others, and getting the goods. Two factors that played a significant role in my continuing friendship with Emily were removal of gating features and interactional control.
In FtF, gating features limit conversation because factors such as physical attractiveness, shyness and social anxiety inhibit people’s abilities to interact with others. However, in CMC these gates no longer exist. Because we could no longer see each other when we talked, a number of visual cues were removed from our interactions. We could not see each other’s physical features or responses. There was a removal of gating features because we could tell each other things that we may have been too embarrassed or shy to say in person. Because we had a greater level of visual anonymity (obviously we were not even close to completely visually anonymous because we had still seen each other everyday for 4 years), we each had increased private self-awareness, and decreased public self-awareness, meaning we that I thought less about how others viewed me, and more about my own thoughts about myself. Emily and I actually became closer by being physically far away from each other because of how the removal of visual and physical social situation gating features facilitated increased self-disclosure.
Another factor that influenced our relationship was interactional control. Interactional control allowed us to choose the channel of communication over which we had the most control in a certain situation and selectively self-present ourselves in a more positive light. That medium, depending on the content of the message, was a Facebook message, an IM, a text message, or a phone call. If I was in a good mood, I would call her so I could better convey that through my voice or word choice. If I was stressed out or in a bad mood about something I didn’t feel like discussing, and didn’t want to show that, I would talk to her through IM or text messages. I think this probably helped our relationship because when I was in a more “volatile” mood, I could choose to keep it simple and text her things rather than talking to her in a synchronous medium that may have resulted in me saying things I would regret. I was selectively self-presented to exaggerate certain aspects of my personality, which is in line with the hyperpersonal model.
Overall, while the relationship between Emily and I has changed since we have gone to college, as most relationships have that I have with people from back home, McKenna's relationship factors of removal of gating factors and interactional control have facilitated a better friendship between us.
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3 comments:
Nanditha, good post. I had both the exact same thing and the exact opposite thing happen to me when I got to college. I had two friends from back home, both of them being very close friends. I would talk to both of them about some things but I would always be nervous about telling them other things. When we would talk online in high school we wouldn't say much. Once I got to school, I mostly stopped talking with one of my friends because he was always busy. My other friend was different. I had the same situation with him as you had with your friend. Our relationship improved and we talked more. I would say for both of us a lack of proximity may have helped our relationships with our friends. Because we knew we would not see our friends soon but we still knew they were good friends we both felt more comfortable talking to our friends openly.
Great post Nanditha. You do a good job of explaining how the gating features changed when you went to college. It's great how you weren't afraid to talk to each other because you didn't have to see each other's reactions. It seems the increased level on anonymity helped you out here.
It's also interesting that you became closer when you moved away. Having the choice of which medium to use when talking to your friend probably helped that a lot. Back home, you probably didn't use all those mediums to communicate because you saw your friend more often.
I'm glad your friendship worked out.
Great post. This is almost exactly what happened to me and my best friends (it actually happened to me twice since I moved to Jersey five years ago and then came to Cornell).
Despite being best buddies and all, there are still things I found I can't talk to people about face to face. Though I guess there are less things like that for me since I am quite a blabber mouth.
Informational control is quite essential too, since you don't want to hurt your friend and thus filter off the negative or damaging things. But I think that letting your friend in on some of the unhappy things that happened in your life is probably good too. You don't have to hide everything when you are angry and stuff. I mean, what are friends for, right?
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