Blog #2

In class we spoke about the four factors of hyper personal communication. They are: the sender, receiver, channel and feedback loop.  I am going to discuss how those factors played into an experience I had with meeting someone online.

            My freshman year of college was a hard transition for me at first. I was homesick most of the time and wasn’t close enough with any of my new peers to vent about it. I decided that I would turn towards a complete stranger to gratify my emptiness. This stranger was someone that had added me on Twitter about two months prior to my arrival at Penn State. This boys name was Tyler. We were the same age and we both attended the same school.

            Tyler and I held extensive conversations through direct message on Twitter. He was there for me through practically everything that troubled me as a freshman because he was going through the same transition I was. The friendship never became intimate, which was what I enjoyed most about it. He was genuinely a good friend that I could talk to. It was this way for about a month that we had spoken to each other, but never met. I tried several times to meet up with him but he was always very last minute with an excuse to not show up. “I just remembered I have an exam review,” or my personal favorite, “I don’t know the campus very well, I got lost.” After multiple attempts at scheduling a date, Tyler soon confessed that he was actually a girl named Samantha. Who, oddly enough, was not lying about her age or where she attended college. She was a freshman at Penn State University. When I asked her why she had lied, her answer was baffling. Samantha told me that she was unable to express her emotions to men because they always had an ulterior motive. She felt that the best way to have an in depth conversation with someone was to pretend she was a good-looking guy that a girl could talk to. It was a strange excuse, but understandable nonetheless.

            Samantha was considered the “sender” in this case. She was selective about her self-presence and was able to abandon information she did not want anyone to know, for example, her gender. Samantha’s interpersonal performance was completely truthful in every aspect except for her sex. This is an excellent example of how easy it is to be something that you are not through hyper personal communication.

            I was the “receiver” in this incident. My ability to interpret only the information she provided made me fall prey to believe she was a man. Not only that, but my impression of her was unrealistic. What kind of genuinely good friend would ditch out on multiple attempts to meet up?

            The “channel” in this case was her immediate feedback, personal language and my feeding into it. I believed the lies she told me because I was only allotted the ability to read her thoughts. I could not hear them, or see her express them. Interacting with each other depended solely upon messaging each other back. Our friendship had nothing to do with any other channel.

            Our “feedback loop” was our intense conversations that focused on our similarities. We were both freshman going through a difficult transition. Because of that similarity we were able to bypass magnifying our differences, which eventually made our friendship even stronger. I wrote long paragraphs, and so did she. I complained about my exams being too stressful, so did she. I missed my family, and so did she. I treated her consistent with how she treated me.

            By learning about the four factors of hyperpersonal communication, I was able to better understand why this entire situation happened the way that it did. Interacting with someone over the Internet allows you minimal access to social context cues.