During the summer before my freshman year of college, I had exchanged emails with the person who was going to be my roommate for the upcoming year, whom I will call Aaron. We had never met each other before and neither of us was on Facebook at that time, so our communication was visually anonymous. Our online conversations consisted of a mix between information exchange and small talk. We discussed what we were going to bring to the dorm, what sports we were playing and other interests. We found that we had a lot in common and I began to think we could be good friends some day. I was very excited to meet this guy, because he seemed like such a genuinely interesting and outgoing person. For instance, his very first email to me had an animated subject line of “Roommate!!!” and contained some lighthearted humor. Before Aaron first contacted me, I was worried that I might get stuck with a bad roommate and have an unfavorable living experience my first year of college. However, after we started sending each other emails, I felt more comfortable about the upcoming year and was convinced of the effectiveness of those roommate surveys they make you take to measure compatibility. Boy was I in for a surprise.
When August came around and we finally met each other face to face, Aaron was a much more shy and reserved person than he seemed in the emails. Online, he also seemed like such a fun, interesting, and upbeat person when in reality, he was much more quiet, subdued, and quite frankly less interesting. This may have been a result of selective self-presentation on his part or perhaps a Hyperpersonal effect created by me, or maybe a combination of both. The Hyperpersonal model suggests that impression formation is more exaggerated and extreme than in FtF interactions based on a smaller amount of available cues from which to form a well-rounded impression. I believe the Hyperpersonal model applies to my experience because of how I created this idealized version of a person with such great personal attributes based only on a small amount of cues. I had such a high expectation for Aaron’s personality that when I actually met him, it was almost inevitable that he could not live up to such high standards I had set for him. In reality, he may have had many of the traits I had attributed to him, just not to the extreme degree with which I expected before meeting.
The timing of the relationship likely played a role in the modality switch. We had begun emailing each other in the first half of July and overall we had exchanged about 10 messages, so I would consider this relationship to be long-term (based on the fact that Ramirez and Wang suggested long-term to be about 6 weeks in their experiment). Ramirez and Wang found that modality switches after a long-term CMC relationship were uncertainty-provoking and resulted in a negative outcome. I found this to be true in my experience, especially since our online communication lasted for so long before meeting and my initial impression took such a long time until it was adjusted for reality during the modality switch. The MS caused a negative outcome, as I explained above, and provoked uncertainty about Aaron’s character especially since I thought I knew the person he would be before meeting, yet he turned out to be someone completely different than I had imagined.
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3 comments:
Nice post, Greg. I also wrote about e-mailing and IMing my roommate prior to coming to Cornell last year. I ended up in the opposite position, though. I was nervous about my roommate since she was going to be an Engineer, but meeting her in person allowed me to see that there was a lot more to her than that. Sure, she's very smart but she's one of the most talkative people I've ever met. It's interesting how these theories work differently for everyone.
Great post! You summarized your experience and related it to both the Hyperpersonal model and URT really well. It seems like the Hyperpersonal model played a role on both ends of this relationship, which was similar to my friend's situation that I wrote about. Both of these experiences with leaving virtuality seem to support Ramirez and Wang's hypothesis that long-term online relationships prior to meeting FtF actually lead to increased uncertainty and a generally negative outcome of finally meeting.
Good post. I, too, contacted my roommate online prior to meeting her, and was a bit concerned that she didn't have very much information on her Facebook. However, my concerns were unwarranted and we ended up being really close. Too bad it didn't work out like that for you.
It's interesting that your experience fits in so perfectly with the findings of Ramirez & Wang's hypothesis. I wonder if you had had a short-term online relationship with your roommate if your experiences would have been any different, but from what you've written- I doubt it.
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