Have you seen that movie that stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan?
The characters Hanks and Ryan play have a growing romantic relationship online. They haven’t met each other offline — or so they think — and yet they find comfort in each other’s words. What they don’t know, but which provides the thrill for the audience, is that they are antagonists fighting over the bookshop that Ryan owns and Hanks wants to buy out.
How they eventually get together, and how couples who meet online eventually marry (like so many Filipino women who met their spouses in chatrooms), is explained by Social Information Processing theory.
Several years ago, such relationships were looked at with suspicion. After all, how sincere are the words coming from a person you haven’t even met except through the Internet? Social Presence theory suggests that when you communicate with someone who isn’t really there, like in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), the exchange can become “more impersonal, individualistic, and task-oriented” (Griffin 142).
Relationships are believed best developed when there is “a rich mix of verbal and nonverbal cue systems,” as explained by Media Richness theory, and not through “the limited bandwidth of CMC” (Griffin 142).
Still another theory explaining how CMC may hinder relationship development is Social Context Cues, where flaming or the use of hostile language may occur because online users may not be aware of interactional norms or rules.
However, Joseph B. Walther’s Social Information Processing (SIP) theory proposes that CMC may just be as effective in developing interpersonal relationships as face-to-face communication.
Walther says that relationships develop through CMC as the two individuals involved gain interpersonal information that becomes the basis for impression formation of each other.
The success of relationships developed through CMC is due to the extended time that this kind of communication entails. Impression formation occurs over a long period; that is, one’s interpersonal information about another is by sips and not by gulps. The rate of information that accumulates over an extended period of interaction — done at the individuals’ own pace, without the pressure of immediately forming impressions that characterize face-to-face communication — allows for a more pleasant exchange.
Moreover, the extended period also provides the individuals in CMC situations to carefully compose their linguistic cues. The careful and thoughtful structuring of written messages — getting the right tone, choosing the right words, drafting and revising of texts — also compensate for the lack of nonverbal cues in CMC. Messages individuals exchange with one another “actually surpasses the quality of relational communication that’s available when parties talk face-to-face” (Griffin 148). While messages conveyed in face-to-face communication are affected by nonverbal cues, the content and quality of verbal cues are not affected by such interventions.
Walther presents four media effects of this kind of hyperpersonal relationships.
One is the selective self-presentation individuals can sustain through CMC to gain positive impressions from others. Another is identification with the other person through overattribution of similarity. Individuals in CMC situations assume, for lack of other cues, that the persons they meet through a particular online group or site share the same interests (otherwise they wouldn’t have logged on to that group or site). Still another media effect is asynchronous interaction, where individuals involved in CMC can choose to communicate with each other on their own time — allowing for the reading and writing of messages during more relaxed conditions. And one more media effect is self-fulfilling prophecy, with the individuals involved in CMC making things happen because they believe it will happen:
Senders self-select what they reveal, receivers create an idealized image of their partner, and the channel lets users express themselves the way they want, when they want. What’s not to like? ¶ Self-fulfilling prophecy is triggered when that hyperpositive image is intentionally or inadvertently fed back to the other, creating the CMC equivalent of the looking-glass self … [and the] person perceived to be wonderful starts acting that way. (Griffin 152)
So you still wonder why online romance is really possible?
I wonder, though, what Walther will say about the use of webcams.
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