Wednesday, July 21, 2010
*Friendships made from cyberspace*
The good ol' Internet-I was introduced to the Internet with web instant message and chat rooms through AOL at the age of 12 years old. Yes, that sounds very young for a child to be on the Internet, I wasn't aware of the effects of online chat. Although, I used common sense and never gave my personal information out to strangers. Connections were made with male and female friends, we were "pen pals". It was very exciting to be able to chat with someone from a different background then mine and also from another country. It was only a click away, to chat with someone over sea's and share common interests with them. It allowed me to know them inter- personally, before jumping to conclusions and pre-judging them from the outer appearance. This is what makes face to face relationships different, we see the person and have bias about them and they may interfere with getting to know the person more. Whereas with communicating online, we can hide behind the computer and have that disconnection between the other person. "We can hide in the back of a classroom or make ourselves unobtrusive in a committee meeting, but when we communicate face to face with one other person, we cannot hide." (Treholm. P. 141) With face to face communication, there is no hiding the face expressions or the non verbal body language. Therefore, that's the main difference with online relationships and face to face interaction.
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I hadn't even thought about the aspect of pre-judging. That is an excellent point. You get to know the person without making a judgment based on appearance. This might be why online dating has success. People are more open to sharing information about themselves because the risk of feeling rejected isn't really there. With face to face communication, there is always immediate judgment. Even if we don't listen to that judgment and try to get to know that person, it is our nature to somewhat judge based on appearance.
ReplyDeleteIt is also a good point that we cannot hide our facial expressions and nonverbal body language in face to face communication. We might try to mask our emotions however, like the book previously stated, sometimes our nonverbal communication says more than the words coming out of our mouths.