Posts Tagged ‘Communication Theory’

On Relationship Layers, Time and Facebook

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to walk into a local event, coffe shop or even a national conference and suddenly find yourself in the middle of a warm hug. A lot of those hugs come from people that we maybe only know through the Interwebz and our banter on Twitter, in blog comments and on especially Facebook. When you think about it, that’s kind of strange, right? I mean, how did our culture suddenly become more comfortable embracing people who, in the context of 10 yeas past, would have been seen as complete strangers or at best a casual business relationship?  What caused this sudden paradigm shift? If you ask me, I think it’s all the layers we now have access to. Relationships Have Layers When professors Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor described the dynamics of relational closeness as peeling away the layers of an onion, I don’t think they could have really known Facebook was coming. In their theory on Social Penetration, the two outline the idea that “penetration” or the gradual development of closeness through our own self-disclosure happens in four stages: Orientation stage – We play safe with small talk and simple, harmless clichés like ‘Life’s like that’, following standards of social desirability and norms of appropriateness. Exploratory affective stage – We now start to reveal ourselves, expressing personal attitudes about moderate topics such as government and education. This may not be the whole truth as we are not yet comfortable to lay ourselves bare. We are still feeling our way forward. This is the stage of casual friendship, and many relationships do not go past this stage. Affective stage – Now we start to talk about private and personal matters. We may use personal idioms. Criticism and arguments may arise. In romantic-type relationships there may be intimate touching and kissing [...]

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The Frames We Use

My friend Becky Johns did her first speaking gig in front of a few hundred people at the Detroit 140 Conference on Wednesday. The topic?  The thinking behind her ongoing photo project, Friends in a Frame. [Becky Johns on Friends in a Frame 2010 from Nate Riggs on Vimeo.] Frames as Buffers I hate getting my picture taken.  I can be on video all day long and it doesn’t bother me, but having someone snap my picture is like going to the dentist.  Uncomfortable. Because I’m uncomfortable, I rarely ever smile.  But, as it turns out, Becky was right.  When I held the frame, I forgot about my discomfort.  I had something else tangible to focus on.  The result?  More personality emerged for Becky to capture, frame by frame. For some people, talking in groups or one-on-one is incredibly uncomfortable.  My friend Brandon Croke once did a search on Twitter for the amount of people who list INFP personality types (Myers-Briggs assessment) in their Twitter profiles.  The results were surprising – and those were just the people courageous enough to list it. Most introverts will tell you that they prefer to be alone or in small groups of trusted friends.  Face-to-face interaction with other humans causes anxiety and discomfort.  Much like Becky uses a frame as a buffer between her subjects and the lens, it would seem that for more introverted personality types, platforms like Twitter and Facebook act in the same way – a buffer that makes it easier to communicate with other humans. Buffered Personalities The web moves fast these days – in real time.  Each communication is but a snap in time distributed using social buffers.  Each snap can show personality, whether you are introverted or extroverted.  The question to consider though is this: [Becky Johns on Friends in a [...]

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