Media Experiment #6

 

Over any computer chat, you are free to be in a comfortable area, you can present any person you want, you can multitask when you use computer chat features. You are far less vulnerable, and far less likely to feel like you’ve said something stupid. Chat features such as AIM, facebook chat, and Yahoo messenger are used by people everyday to talk to people who we know in our daily lives, and more importantly people who don’t know. While there is a since of immediacy still present when you are chatting with someone in these forms, the main difference is the environment you create for yourself. If you were in a public sphere having a conversation with someone, you may not feel comfortable- the place is too loud, thoughts of “what if they think I’m hideous?” are most likely racing through your head, not only to you have the person you’re talking to judging what you’re saying, but they’re probably judging everything else. The judgment becomes especially hard to handle if you’re disabled or perhaps are uncomfortable in your own gender or race. In chats you have the ability to alter these things, or even omit them altogether, to almost take control of the setting of your conversation. Turkle presents examples of people who have said they were not comfortable by how they were treated in chats when they stated they were a female in here chapter "Tinysex and Gender Trouble." There was a sense of a “frat house” atmosphere, that could easily be absolved when they changed their gender to male. Out in the real world, we are stuck with our gender, and any potential reaction to it. A woman can’t walk into a bar and suddenly convince everyone to not approach her a certain way because she shouts “I’m a male.” In Turkle’s writings, chats allow us to do just that without little questioning.

In real life, there is far less control when we are having a conversation with someone, and even far harder to simply sign off. Online if you are suddenly uncomfortable with what someone is saying to you, you can simply sign off, and you have successfully escaped the offending conversation. In a public conversation there are rules of behavior; we have to be polite, presentable, and simply walking away mid-conversation is seen as socially unacceptable. Rules are completely made up by you in mediated conversation.

These lines do seem to be blurring with the invention of video chatting or Chat Roulette. Skype is seen as the place to video chat with people. These makes the mediated conversation far less mediated. You might even feel more vulnerable because someone can suddenly video call you, when you are in your own personal space, thus losing control of the conversation. The vulnerability is now once again a factor when using the computer as the mediator, even though it was once the place where you created what ever reality you wanted.

When we have a conversation using media, it is as Marshall Mcluhan explains in is chapter Media as Translators. We are all the stuttering children, because in some way or another we all have our self-perceived faults, and mediated conversation makes the stutter go away, because it becomes another form of language, or another language altogether. It can be likened to Jake Sully's infatuation with the ability to walk and move again in his Avatar form. He feels a since of freedom and mobility that was not offered before. To some people, simply talking in an electronic form serves as another world where the have the ability to do things they could not before.