Hyperpersonal Communication - Faisal Hirji

In class we have been discussing hyperpersonal communication, we have grown up in a time when Computer media communication has become a very prominent part of our generations everyday lives. I have never really been big on the whole CMC thing so when it got to a point in my life where everyone was on the internet despite my reluctance to join in I felt obligated.

My First Interaction with hyperpersonal communication was through a now archaic channel in Aim, while I had a basic idea of what Aim was and that I was supposed to connect with and communicate with friends or at least people I knew I inevitably ended up getting a message from someone i did not recognize. I was very young at the time probably around 12 or 13 and the person who i was talking to disclosed herself as a 17 year old girl. This is where my first interaction as a sender and receiver really took off. 

At first contact I thought it was pretty weird that she was messaging me but at the same time I felt pretty cool about it and I guess was happy to have someone to talk to. 
After a while of talking I cam to the realization that this person I was talking to was fairly truthful in most things that she said to me. She would ask me a lot of questions in regards to my family particularly one of my sisters. I did not really consider the reason she was talking to me or why she had such a curiosity, but then I began to realize a pattern in the way she asked her questions seeing that she was far more interested in learning things about my sister than anything else. That is when it dawned n me as the receiver that this was one of my sisters friends trying to get info on my sister. Once I realized this I called my sister over for conformation which she provided.

Now I had the ability to have my own fun as the sender. I chose tho say outrageously made up things about my sister, Giving her the stories she was looking for but making them explicitly far fetched so my sister could call her on it if she tried to proclaim the stories to have any real validity. This was the first time that it dawned on me how many things are left out during computer mediated communication, and naturally I used that new found information to trick my friends.

What this experience truly taught was the power to strategically withhold information, and without the element or even awkwardness of FTF communication that can extend to a very far level. To a point where you don't have to let someone know anything about yourself and can take on different personas if truly desired. Which gets into the danger of hyperpersonal communication, you should never give the person on the other side of the conversation the level of trust you would even give to a stranger on the street because unless you know the person directly you never know if people are really who they claim to be.