Blog 2

            In the online world users are introduced to hundreds of ways of communication that allow them to explore identities, form relationships, and establish personas. According to Joseph Walther, hyperpersonal communication is the concept that “mediated communication is more socially desirable than we tend to experience in parallel face-to-face interaction.” In other words, there are benefits that people get during online interaction while forming relationships that are not necessarily received through real life interaction. In class we discussed such benefits and during this discussion, I related it to my experiences on Tumblr.

            Tumblr is a blogging site in which the user can custom-design a blog page consisting of written posts, pictures, gifs, videos, links, etc. Essentially, it is a huge collection of things that the user finds interesting and relatable. Just like other social media, users can follow one another so that their posts show up on a home page/ dashboard. I have had a Tumblr for several years and have both firsthand experienced communication on the website and witnessed it occur. It is very easy for users to be selective in the way they present themselves to their followers in both the pictures they decide to put up and in what they communicate. Senders can communicate messages with their identities visible or anonymously. Typically, they do so anonymously, which can cause many problems for the receiver. It is already difficult enough for the receiver to be confident that this person is who they say they are. In a somewhat flipped situation, I was the sender and a kid whose blog I absolutely loved was the receiver. I messaged him, with my username visible, and he replied back to me. He had pictures on his “face” page, so I was sure he was legitimately who he claimed to be. He replied to my post publically so that all of his followers could see what I said. Not even ten minutes later I received a message from another user who claimed to be the kid in his pictures, stating that the original kid was a “poser.” As you can probably imagine, I was extremely confused. Who should I believe?

            Thinking back, I’m not sure why I spent an extensive amount of time trying to get to the bottom of it, but I figured out that the user who messaged me was, in fact, the real guy in the pictures on the “poser’s” blog. People online really do have an advantage in communicating who they are. Other benefits of hyperpersonal communication include asynchronous communication and buffering on the channel. Tumblr messaging is at the pace between emailing and text messaging. It allows people to think hard about their self-presentation and decide exactly how they would like to be viewed. I have actually witnessed a relationship form on Tumblr between two people that I follow, one of which is my very good girl-friend. This friend is gay and she met another girl on Tumblr who also seemed very real and very normal, even to me. From an outsider’s perspective, their relationship seemed perfect. After a failed attempt to convene, my good friend became skeptical and did a lot of research. She actually discovered that the girl she was talking to was not in fact who she said she was. In fact, she was 5 years younger, making her 13!  This just shows how Tumblr works as an impeccable gateway for hyperpersonal communication, allowing users to cloud aspects of their lives they wish to keep secret.

            The last part of hyperpersonal communication is the feedback loop, which is when online partners magnify their similarities and choose to ignore their differences. The loop also involves treating one another consistently alike. Obviously by doing this they will feel an intense connection, but those differences cannot be avoided forever.

            Throughout my experiences on Tumblr I have both lived through some aspects of hyperpersonal communication and witnessed tragic occasions of it unfold before my eyes. There are many positives to it, but if used without caution it can have devastating results.