I googled chat rooms and at random picked freejavachat.com. I was more interested in observing than interacting, so I picked a room with a title suggesting that it was for teenagers, and didn't have a topic of discussion, just general chat. I also chose to limit the time I would spend observing my target to 5-10 minutes to see how drastically it would affect my impression.
I watched the chat progress for only a short time before one person stood out to me, I'll refer to him as L. On this site, you are assigned a nickname "Visitor_(some number)" until you change it yourself. L had a unique name, but one person in the room did not. L took it upon himself to preach to this visitor, telling him that he should pick a new name. Without prompting, L told the room the he had been going as "L" for years now. Once the visitor changed his name (admittedly, he changed it to something ridiculous), L engaged in a fairly normal conversation about the different countries of the world and their relative sizes. He also did not engage in a common practice of typing out descriptions of physical actions for humor, ie. "A slaps B in the face", when a few other people were goofing around with it.
From this short observation, I made several assumptions about L. I believe that he spends a lot of time in chat rooms, is probably over 20 years old, is male, and goes into chat rooms to engage in meaningful conversations. With my mental impression of L that I formed in a very short time, I don't feel that I'm able to describe his strengths in the big 5 traits with any sort of confidence. The observation gave me much stronger impressions about his physical attributes than his personality.
The intentional limitation of the time I observed L makes it hard for me to say with any conviction whether Social Information Processing applied to my experience. All I can say is that I observed L for a short time, and do not feel confident that I know his personality at all. This is in accordance with SIP because it says that in CMC more time is needed to exchange social information.
My encounter seemed to concur with CFO in the sense that the lack of cues prevented me from knowing anything about L's personality. I also know nothing about his likes, interests, personal life. Even though I watched him interact with several people, I feel that my impression of him is very shaky.
The hyperpersonal model didn't seem to fit my experience. I did not over-attribute L's personality traits. Perhaps this is because I didn't observe him long enough to see any threads to grab hold of, but it is also possible that I never would have found them. The developmental aspect of the HP model concurs with SIP, so on this point, I agree with the HP model. I didn't experience the other three criteria of the HP model. This could have been because of the limited time, or my particular subject's lack of self-disclosure.
1 comment:
Nice post Rich,
You said that you limited the time that you observed your target on purpose to form your impression of the person online. This small amount of time would definitely angle your view askew and cause an approximation of their personality to something that might be nothing close to the real thing.
I think it would have been interesting if you had tried writing down your CFO impression and then continued to observe them and see if you could eventually form an impression based on the hyperpersonal model. Then you would have been able to see how accurate a CFO impression could have been.
Your observations were probably more accurate due to the fact that you did not interfere with the conversations and just let them go on their own but it probably made it harder to form an impression.
Good analysis.
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