No Sexytime For You

I had never been in a chat room before doing this exercise, so I, like many of the rest of the class, just did a google search for chat rooms. Not feeling like downloading any new applications or registering for anything, I just joined a general chat on AIM. Upon entering, it just seemed like a barrage of bad language, poor grammar, and incoherent thought. Not wanting to stay in this ridiculous room anymore, I asked if anyone wanted a serious private chat.

The first person that responded was just looking for some “sexytime.” I didn’t want any of that, so I left and asked the same chat room the same question again. This time around, I got a regular person: “mxp123”. I got the standard a/s/l questioning, but a response of “who cares?” seemed to satisfy mxp. The beginning of our conversations was a little awkward and weird. There were longer pauses than expected and a lot of generic small talk. It didn’t seem like mxp really had a cold personality, just that neither one of us really had anything important to say.

Wanting to find something that could be meaningful to the both of us, or at least stimulate some sort of conversation, I asked mxp if he was in school. I was happy to hear that he was a freshman at Purdue. We talked for a while about college and what we liked and disliked about it. It was whilst talking about college that I noticed that not only was mxp beginning to show signs of acting within the hyperpersonal model, but so was I. When we were both discussing various goals and fears we had about the future, I realized that I was saying things that I never tell people in real life. I definitely was not giving the full breadth of my emotions, but rather focusing in on a specific aspect, and while I don’t know for sure, I think mxp was doing the same. I think the ability to enter into a hyperpersonal modeled personality was actually very nice. It felt cathartic to me to vent my feelings to some random person in cyberspace that I knew I would never meet in real life. For all the shortcomings of CMC, I think that this aspect may actually be an advantage, provided it is something you are looking for.