The Rhythms of Impression Formation
In a face-to-face interaction, it is easy to get the business of forming an impression of another person over with quickly. Online, however, the rhythms of impression formation show some roller coaster variations, and the medium has much to do with this. It is always slower than face-to-face, and much choppier. The pacing is like the belabored ascents and thrilling descents on Disney World's Space Mountain ride.
When a stranger addresses you in a chat room, for example, and you type a reply immediately, your remark may appear on everyone else's screen within a second or two, or it may take a full minute. Long transmission delays and a large number of users may lead the stranger to think you're a hesitant or uninterested conversationalist. If nothing appears within 2 or 3 minutes, the stranger's query is electronically dead and buried. It scrolls off the communal screen and the chatting session moves on to other matters. As I mentioned in the last chapter, the lag in chat sessions and the need to type your replies affect the register, and though people strive for a "conversational" tone the pace is slower than one on the phone or in person. The "bursty" nature of transmission makes it impossible to use ordinary rhythm norms associated with these other settings.
We do try to borrow some of the rhythmic and social conventions we're accustomed to, especially those from the telephone. A person might start a synchronous chat by saying "hi" or "hello," and anticipate some response within a short period of time, and then expect the usual conversational turn-taking. To end the discussion, one might type "nice talking to you," or an abbreviation like bbl (be back later). On the phone, the same general rules apply, though any breaks in pacing like those typical in chat sessions would be devastating to the exchange. Try waiting just 3 seconds before saying "hello" when you answer a ringing phone, or avoid using vocal fillers like "uh huh" when your phone partner pauses for a moment. You will probably hear, "Hello? Are you still there?"
The rhythms in email and the asynchronous discussion forums are much slower than the chat sessions, and communications researcher Joseph Walther suggests that this feature might make people seem colder than they would in a face-to-face interaction, at least initially. Much of the early research comparing impression formation online and in person involved short-term interactions, so-called zero-history groups, in which strangers worked together for brief periods. The people may simply not have had enough time to form more than an amorphous impression of their invisible partners. With the lean communication channels available online and the slow and choppy pacing, a well-developed impression of an individuated other may take longer, even using all our shortcuts, but it will probably emerge.
Walther demonstrated how these rhythms work with an asynchronous discussion forum and an unusually long experiment. Groups of three people each were asked to develop policy recommendations on several different issues, by means of either face-to-face meetings or online discussion forums. Whenever a group completed a task, the members rated the personality characteristics of the others in their group. Unlike most such scales, this one included a "don't know" check box so the people wouldn't just check the noncommittal middle box when their impressions were weak. After the first task, the face-to-face group members had already developed strong impressions of one another, but the computer-mediated groups had not. By the end of the third task, though, the people who knew each other online developed much stronger impressions of one another, almost as vivid as those who were meeting face-to-face.
