In class we talked about how researchers initially thought that online interaction would be an interpersonal thing; meaning that people wouldn’t care to connect with complete strangers online but they soon realized that people who used the internet were forming relationships with other people and, over time, that interpersonal connection became hyperpersonal. Hyperpersonal communication is a type of interpersonal communication that exceeds face-to-face communication in the sense that it allows people to be more open and friendly with people who they meet online as opposed to the people they know or meet in real life.
I first thought it would be the complete opposite; that people would feel more comfortable talking to people they knew about personal things than they would a stranger. However, the more we talked about it in class, the more sense it made. It’s hard for us to talk about things to the people we know, especially to the people we care deeply about, because we have to live with their judgment; we can’t just log out of the relationship like it’s a chat room and pretend like us, for example, pouring out our hearts didn’t happen. Being people, we have a natural inclination to want to talk about our problems or even just share things with other people about ourselves. If we’re shy or if we just don’t want to talk to a person face-to-face, online communication is the best alternative because you can be whoever you want to be and say whatever you want to say without ever worrying about running into the person you are conversing with online. Even if it’s someone you know very well, having conversations that you don’t feel comfortable having in real life is less intimidating when that conversation is being had through text message or Facebook Messenger. Hyperpersonal communication supposedly ‘exceeds’ face-to-face communication and I think the reason it does is because it takes out all of the nonverbal cues, like facial expressions and body language, and just leaves room for communication to happen. This is because it is very similar to FtF in the sense that it involves a sender, a receiver, and a message. The only thing that differs is the channel that the message is sent and received through and the fact that there is a feedback loop where , for example, you only get to go off of how similar you are to someone you’re talking to online as opposed to the differences you might notice if you were talking to this person face to face.
There are pros and cons that come with hyperpersonal communication but, given the cons (i.e. communicating with predators, cons, etc.) why is it that people continue to communicate with other people online? The answer to this question, I think, has a lot to with the social presence theory. Social presence is the “level of interpersonal contact and feelings of intimacy experienced in communication” (Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004) and it is often associated with physical closeness because of the belief that social presence is only communicated through the nonverbal cues that being face to face or, even, videochatting allows us to see. Now that researchers/scholars know that you don’t necessarily have to be in close proximity to a person in order to feel close to them, I think the social presence theory or the concept of social presence can be revised to include hyperpersonal communication.
Since people participate in online dating and continue to communicate with friends and family online, it’s not right to say that because there is a lack of visual cues, this kind of media generates a low social presence. People can maintain long-distance friendships and relationships, and sometimes they are a lot stronger and longer lasting than traditional friendships/relationships.
Being able to communicate with someone face to face doesn’t make the communication process any more pleasant or intimate than if it were online. The important thing to remember is that, either way, it is possible for us to have a high social presence in either forms of communication.
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