Miscommunication Online

I began dating my current boyfriend, Chris, in the early days of summer of 2007. We immediately hit it off, and began our initial friendship by telling each other childhood stories. We got along so well, and the words never stopped flowing. The communicative connection we had was one-of-a kind, and we thought it was irreplaceable. Conversely to these beliefs, when I went back to college in the fall, I lived 2 hours away from him. But the extension of distance between us was nothing compared to the miscommunications we experienced while talking online.

Chris and I had become so attached emotionally to each other during that summer. Then suddenly, we only saw each other on weekends and were forced to correspond through mediated means. He had Verizon, but I only had a tracfone, so talking on the phone was reserved only for emergencies and for information on a need-to-know basis. AOL’s instant messenger program consequently became our primary mode of communication. Now let me tell you both of our attitudes toward the program. Chris HATES AIM, and thinks that it’s a waste of precious time that could be used to be productive. However, since it was for me, he was willing to do anything, because I loved AIM. When I used to live at college, I was an instant messenger addict. The activity associated with talking to my friends and surfing the internet accounted for many hours of my day, and I used it to procrastinate my assignments every day. It was a bad situation looking back on it now, but at the time, I felt so stressed about my schoolwork that I dug the hole deeper.

While I was at college, Chris and I talked a lot over AIM. However, the communication lines between us became tense very easily, much more easily than in real life. It was harder to sense what the other was feeling, especially when Chris typed me one word answers to my questions. We are both extremely emotional and sensitive people, and AIM simply made our conversations less comfortable. I missed being with Chris so much when I was two hours away from him, because we continued to have a close and committed relationship, but he seemed so far away because of our AIM conversations. It just felt like there was always something left unsaid.

One day, our conversation went from rambling about our daily activities to a social situation which made Chris uncomfortable. When he attempted to explain himself, the details of his explanation confused me so much about the situation that I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about. Next, he replied with “no, and you never will know what I’m talking about.” Well, that phrase set me off in an angry rage, and so I said “screw you” and signed off. That’s not a nice thing to be saying to my boyfriend. We were both frustrated in the break in communication caused by our inability to express how we really feel online.

If this situation would have happened when Chris and I were standing face-to-face, we would have never gave up and stopped communicating. We would have continued the conversation until a mutual understanding been reached, and not walked away in anger like we both did the night of the tense online conversation. Wood & Smith cite on pg 182 that as we rely more and more on technology, it “plays a critical role in shaping changes in society.” Chris and I have both agreed that we hate where the world is heading, and that the changes brought upon by the continuing and increasing reliance on technology cannot be good ones. What is being gained by our culture is nowhere near the amount of what is being surrendered by our culture to technology.