11. “As you’ll likely find out, I’m strage”

As some of the posts from my classmates illustrate, meeting one’s college roommate is a great example for this assignment. Like many others, my freshman roommate and I had never met prior to coming to Cornell and our first interaction took place online. I was the first to make contact, emailing him in late July, and he responded by admitting that he had been putting it off because he was a bit shy. He also explained that he was an engineer and said, “As you will most likely find out, I'm strange; so I don't have a cell phone or use IM.” I was immediately getting the feeling that he wasn’t a very social person and he’d probably be a bit of a hermit. However, in our second messages we did find that we had a few things in common, including our interest in outdoor activities, and even our favorite color (green). So after exchanging a few emails I was expecting that we’d get alone just fine.

The somewhat uninteresting nature of our conversation and the lack of other means of communication (see: no cell phone or screen name) led to a very brief conversation between us. Therefore the interaction is too short to analyze with SIP. The Uncertainty Reduction Theory says that as you gain more information about someone, you will develop a greater liking of that person. My roommate’s and my interaction over the Internet was brief, but within only two messages my impression of him got better when I learned of the interests that we had in common so the URT could potentially be supported.

Ultimately when we met, despite our similarities, we turned out to be very incompatible. We didn’t necessarily dislike each other (well, I should say I don’t dislike him, he probably hates me) but we simply didn’t have much in common. I enjoyed going out periodically, and he preferred staying in and tended to avoid socializing with anyone new. I tended to stay up very late at night, and he was always in bed by 10pm. So the URT, which predicted a positive outcome from meeting in real life, was incorrect, and both the SIDE theory and the Hyperpersonal model, which both predicted a negative outcome from meeting in real life, were correct. As both theories predicted, I took our similarities into account and tended to dismiss our differences.

Finally, my experience was not consistent with Ramirez & Wang’s results. They predicted that short-term interactions in CMC would lead to a positive effect when leaving virtuality, and long-term interactions would lead to a negative effect. However in my case, our interactions were short-term and turned out negative in real-life. I believe the length of our online interaction was somewhat of a predictor of our real-life relationship in that we didn’t particularly find each other interesting enough to talk for very long.

Comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/11/virtuality-insanity.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/11/11-meeting-irl-is-shocking.html