Computer-Mediated Anthropology
|
|
An Online Resource Center |
|
CMA Methodology: Establishing Rapport Online by Noah Porter, July 2004 |
|
Introduction: Is Cyberspace too Impersonal to Establish Rapport?
I recently took a course called Work & Gender, taught by Dr. Kevin Yelvington. For a class project, I did a study of the bartenders at a local goth club. While there are other events on different nights, only the Friday and Saturday night events are explicitly goth. Also, once at the club, you quickly realize that the strong value on personal space works against establishing rapport very quickly. Luckily, the club's message board gave me a chance to interact with the club patrons in a social context more conducive to conversation. Because physical bodies are not present in the virtual interactions, the suspicion of flirtatious motivations for conversation is eliminated (or at least greatly reduced). Also, the interactions are structured in such a way that it is acceptable to jump into almost any conversation, as opposed to in the club where: "People unfamiliar with...acceptable methods of introduction often meet with a cold half acknowledgment of their approach and a quick escape by the person they have accidentally offended with their inept approach" (Bexton 2002). When I mentioned establishing rapport online in my paper, Dr. Yelvington commented: "Do you think it does? Or creates more distance because of it's impersonal nature?" Is this a correct assumption? Do social relationships established online have an impersonal nature?" (see Figure 1). Here's some different definitions of "impersonal" that I found on a dictionary site: 1. Showing no emotion or personality: an aloof, impersonal manner. Each of these definitions implies something different when we say that virtual communities have an "impersonal nature." The first would imply that online social interactions lack emotion. The second would imply that online interactions are anonymous. The third would imply that online social interactions lack humanistic qualities. After corresponding with Dr. Yelvington about the issue, I believe he meant "impersonal" according to the second definition of the word. However, since online interactions have been accused of all three, I will address each. One way in which we might address whether cyberspace has an "impersonal nature" is to see what effect meeting in 3D has upon people who met online. I will not be limiting this examination to research relationships, but also including friendly and romantic relationships since if cyberspace has an "impersonal nature", it would presumably affect these types of social relationships as well. Do Online Interactions Lack Emotion? Correll (1995, "The Ethnography of an Electronic Bar: The Lesbian Cafe", Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24(3):270-298) actually got a chance to meet her informants after doing a virtual ethnography. She was "struck by how much more at ease these women were (online) than they were at a real bar at night" (p. 281). For her informants, the electronic bar was "more about making friends and talking and playing with each other," while real bars are "where the games are for real" (p. 281). Note that emotions are present in both cases, but the emotions are different. As for lovers, there are plenty of anecdotal success stories (and a few failures), as this site shows. Here is one of the more glowing successes: "We met in March on her Spring Break and she spent the week with me in Georgia. Needless to say, it was a weekend of romance and love. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. She is moving to Atlanta from Dallas when she graduates nursing school in June. We will wed in November." Here is an example of one of the negative experiences on the site: My initial caution melted away as I fell for his "smooth talking". After several months of intense courtship, he became aloof, distant. As it turned out, he had a girlfriend he didn't tell me about. It hurt, he thought I was silly to be hurt. Talking with other women in the same chatroom, I found out that he had been romancing about half of them with different stories...Lying was coming as naturally to him as breathing. So the lesson to be learned here girls is...Be careful, beware!You don't really know who you are talking to. Guard yourselves well and give the flesh and blood guys of the real world a chance...It's harder to lie when you live 3 blocks away than 500 hundred miles away. Love does not live on a computer screen... [Love Life Radio Network 2003] For an interesting case study that explores the tensions between how "real" things that happen in cyberspace should be treated, see "A Rape in Cyberspace" by Julian Dibbell (1998). Do Online Interactions Necessarily Entail Anonymity? Interestingly, what is described in the aforementioned negative anecdote can also be found in Sannicolas'(1997) study: Over the past 3 years, the issue of romantic relationships that have formed "on-line" has been a popular topic on yet another television forum, the "Talk-Show". This has written yet another script for the "puter" stage. There are those who enter into on-line chats in order to meet that special someone. These performers usually enter via the various Special Interest Groups (SIG's), going right to the source of finding people with similar interests. His study highlights how there are negative consequences for puprosely misrepresenting oneself. Also noteworthy is the low percentage of successful relationships that have formed in this manner. I suspect that there are a few variables to help explain this: 1. The relative novelty of Internet interactions at the time the article was written; 2. People who enter chatrooms specifically to find sigificant others clearly are attached to the idea of it, and therefore may have more motivation to misrepresent themselves; 3. No demographic information is given, but I suspect that people who hang around in this chat room are likely to be young teenagers, whose relationships are often short-lived anyway. Baker (1998), however did gather demographic data from her informants, and finds more positive outcomes than Sannicolas did. She writes: "Most sent a photo before meeting after communicating from a few weeks or months to almost two years online. Expectations among these couples seemed realistic, with very few surprises or differences from earlier envisionings. A few noted comparisons of the real person to out-of date, unflattering, or even artificially glamourous photos." The following is quoted from the abstract of "'Making MOOsic': the development of personal relationships online and a comparison to their off-line counterparts" (Parks, M.R.; Roberts, L.D., Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 15(4):517-537): Despite the rapid development of the Internet over the past decade and the associated media hyperbole about cyberspace relationships, there is a paucity of systematic research examining the prevalence, type and development of personal relationships in on-line settings. This research examines relational topography in real-time text-based virtual environments known as MOOs (Multi-User Dimensions, Object Oriented). Current users of MOOs (235) completed a survey on MOO relationships, with 155 also completing a survey on offline relationships. Almost all survey respondents (93.6%) had formed ongoing personal relationships on MOOs. The most commonly reported types of relationships were close friendships, friendships and romances. The majority of relationships formed (83.6%) was with members of the opposite sex. Levels of relational development (interdependence, depth, breadth, code change, commitment, predictability/understanding, network convergence) were typically moderate to high. Most relationships had migrated to other virtual environments, and a third had resulted in face-to-face meetings. On average, MOO relationships were found to be more developed than newsgroup relationships, but less developed than off-line relationships. It was concluded that MOOs provide an inherently social and powerful context for the formation of personal relationships, many of which will transfer to other settings. Of note here, as I suspected when I commented on Sannicola's article, is that different online venues have different levels of intimacy associated with them. This can also be seen in Bird's (2003, "The Audience in Everyday Life") study of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman fans: Internet communities, like place-based communities, do not just happen. They develop in response to particular circumstances and to the needs of a particular set of individuals. A striking thing about the DQ list is the level of trust and openness that has grown up in it. Critics bemoan the implications of electronic anonymity and role-playing for traditional notions of communication. Yet DQMW-L points to the fact that Internet communication does not have to be anonymous. Some listers like to use a "pen-name," but none hide their real identity. There is an online, voluntary directory, where members post their names, states, and e-mail addresses, and visit each other. They warn each other about the dangers involved in anonymous chat rooms, and compare their community to the otherwise bleak cyberspace. (p. 74) Do Online Interactions Lack Humanistic Qualities? Suler's (1997) article "The Final Showdown Between In-Person and Cyberspace Relationships" provides many interesting points of comparison between online and 3D relationshions, including: synchronous versus asychnronous communication, cognitive differences in expression between communication mediums, the recorded nature of online communication, the presence or absence of the human voice, seeing the person's face and body language, the ability to have physical contact, smell, presence or absense of multiple types of sensory information, and "conclusions based on an unconscious detection of subtle qualities in voice, body language, or things said between the lines." So what do all these information-gathering differences amount to? Jacobson (1999) wrote: "Although researchers have emphasized the difficulties involved in impression formation in computer-mediated communication, people in the text-based virtual communities of cyberspace do develop images of one another. These impressions are based not only on cues provided, but also on the conceptual categories and cognitive models people use in interpreting those cues." I would criticize his article, however, on the grounds of advancing technology making more information about the other person available, people learning how to more realistically evaluate information gathered in virtual contexts after years of online interactions, and the possibility of people acknowledging the gaps in their understanding about online friends/lovers rather than immediately filling in the gap with some sort of stereotype. Finally, Robin Hamman (1998) writes: Other critiques of online communication are seen in the first chapter of this paper. These include Kroker & Weinstein, Boal, and Heim, all of whom fail to produce any evidence for their theories that living part of our lives in cyberspace can lead to social isolation, loss of community, and ultimately the death of the "real". They assume, just because it’s online, that everything which happens in cyberspace is only a simulation of reality. Yet, I doubt that they would say that a conversation held over the telephone is not a real conversation. Communication found online, regardless of whether it is between people who have never met before or between those who are already known to each other, is as real as any other form of communication found elsewhere. Participants in my study have demonstrated time and time again that online communication helps them to maintain, and in some cases improve, their pre-existing social networks. Yes, it is possible that some users of computer networks will turn their backs on the offline world around them in order to spend as much time as possible in cyberspace. But this can be said about just about any activity. For example, for many people drinking alcohol is a social activity involving other people, but for a few, drinking becomes a disease which can lead to despair and loneliness. I’ve found no evidence that any of the participants of this study have turned their back on the offline world, nor that they are in danger of doing so. In fact, most of my evidence suggests that users are seeking further connections with the offline world through computer mediated communication. (Chp. 5) Conclusion In summary, establishing rapport online is quite possible, although the possibility can vary by online community, and in some cases, it is a very useful thing for an anthropologist to do. Albert Benschop wrote: "When we take these peculiarities of internet-mediated love relations together we get this definition: netlove is an imagined kind of bodiless love without direct consequences for the local social life. If people define this kind of love as real, it will eventually become real in its consequences." If both anthropologist and his or her online subject feel that they have established rapport, then hasn't that social relationship become "real in its consequences" as well? References Cited Baker, Andrea Benshop, Albert Bexton, William Bird, S. Elizabeth Correll, Shelley Dibbell, Julian Hamman, Robin Jacobson, David Love Life Radio Network Parks, M.R.; Roberts, L.D. |
|
Figure 1: A comment by Dr. Kevin Yelvington: |
