It took some thought for me to decide which online space I should visit for this assignment. I have used the Internet for a while now and have used many of it's communication technologies at one time or another. Ultimately, I decided on a web based chat on a topic that I know nothing about, skating. After some initial difficulty, I found a room that had other chatters in it but was not over full.
Inside was a cacophony of voices all shouting at each other, mainly on the topics of whether one of them was the cutest or coolest and whether the white people in the chat room had to right to say the word “nigga”. Eager to participate, I joined in on both discussions. However, it took a decent amount of time for one of them to respond to my comments.
There are two reasons for this, I believe. One is that even though there was a bunch of text scrolling by, none of the comments were very substantive. Thus most of the chatters didn't pay attention to others comments at all and simply focused on crafting their own comments. This explanation is most in line with the Cues Filters Out (CFO) perspective's hypothesis that the less cues that are available, the more likely people are to focus on themselves. However, there is a problem with this; there were many cues scrolling by all time, it's just that no one was paying attention to them. The lack of substance in the comments accounts for this discrepancy.
The second reason that my comments were ignored is that my style of typing was markedly different from the other chatters. I wrote in full sentences, used capitalization and punctuation and did my best to spell everything correctly. The other chatters only capitalized for emphasis, rarely used punctuation and used many standard spelling short cuts. These obvious differences in presentation lead many chatters to initially ignore me, then later chat with me but without addressing the substance of my comments. I believe the Social Identity/Deindividualization theory best accounts for this behavior. The style in which I presented my comments put me in a different group from the rest of the chatters so that when they finally did respond to me, they responded to me as an outsider and not part of their group identity.
My experience reflects the Hyperpersonal model only in terms of selective self presentation. Of course, I do not know what my fellow chatters are like in real life but I have a suspicion that they do not act nearly as tough in the real world as they did in the chatroom. I did not observe any of the other aspects of this model, however its possible that in another online space where more substantive conversation is available the hyperpersonal model will better explain the interactions.
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2 comments:
I find your way of differentiating yourself from the chat group very interesting. Capitalization and punctuation creates a very distinct difference in the tone that one uses online, especially in a chat room. For instance, when a professor writes an email response to me in lowercase letters, I am more compelled to respond informally, which is natural and more efficient. In a chat room, efficiency and informality seem to rule.
I might question your attribution of CFO to the chat room conversation. Is it possible that people were reading the comments but not responding directly to anyone specifically? Also, when one is being bombarded by a number of comments, one might not feel necessary to respond to a specific person, but address the group's issues as a whole with a more general comment. Did you attribute any negative traits to those people in the chat room due to the lack of detailed content? If so, I think this would qualify for CFO.
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