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Virtual Communities | |||
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In recent years, some Internet companies have tried to facilitate online social interactions. E-mails have been shown to facilitate maintaining local and distant friendships. Most of these companies have failed to deliver a total social networking solution to members. However, most do have at least one partial solution to the whole problem. Even so, some of these tools have disadvantages compared to real social interactions.
Weaknesses of Online Interactions Online interactions refer to chat rooms, instant messaging, and message boards. The Internet has become a popular place to socially interact. The evidence is the increasing popularity of chat rooms and virtual communities. America Online uses this popularity to market its services. ICQ has over 135 million members. AOL Instant Messenger has over 69 million AOL Buddies. According to a recent study, hours online have increased while television time has decreased. Recent market research estimates that an average Internet user will be online for 4 hours each day. Two-thirds of members of online forums reported forming offline friendships. Most experts believe that the Internet should be used to initiate or facilitate social interactions. However, it could not replace live meetings due to many disadvantages. 1. Ineffective Communication The first disadvantage of online social interactions is that people are unable to fully express themselves online. Nonverbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, and pitch or tone of voice, are absent from online interactions. A classic study by Roxanne and Turoff reported face-to-face meetings expressed more agreement with one another. In contrast, online groups made more remarks to express disagreement and fewer remarks to relieve tense situations. Rodney Fuller, from a latter study researching impression formation, found that mistakes about warmth and coldness of individuals online were very common. To substitute for the lack of nonverbal cues, people online have created emoticons such as a smile, frown, or stick our tongues out as well as linguistic "softeners" like the words "y'know" and "like". 2. Slow Impressions Secondly, the rhythms of impression are slower and choppier than face-to-face interactions. Delays of a few seconds may convey false hesitation or disinterest. The rhythms of email or discussion forums are even slower. Joseph Walther reports from his study of computer-mediated interaction that these delays make people seem colder than they would be if face-to-face interactions had taken place. Also, the online group took about 3 times the period of the face-to-face group to develop impressions of each other in the group. 3. Increased Social Isolation Finally, the Internet has increased social isolation in the United States. A recent Stanford study of 4,113 individuals reported that the more time people spend using the Internet, the more they lose contact with their social environment and the more time they spend working at home or at the office. Surprisingly, the researchers reported that chat rooms are for the young and the anonymous. Using chat rooms substantially decreases after age 25. | |||
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