Internet Dating: Friend or Foe?

The movie "You've Got Mail" is a story of two real-life enemies becoming intimate online. Kathleen Kelly owns a small bookstore, and Joe Fox builds a large competitor across the street. Kathleen hates Joe, and everything he represents. What she doesn't know, is she's actually falling in love with him online, through e-mail exchanges of a "mystery friend."

"Oh mystery man, you're so nice, unlike that jerk Joe!"

"You've Got Mail" is exploring the idea that Joseph Walter proposed in 1992: we can find intimacy through "Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)." This idea is now known as Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) , and suggests that despite taking more time than face-to-face contact, can create just as much, if not more intimacy.

While the movie is cute, and the theory sounds great, I have to say that I disagree with the idea of CMC creating good intimacy. My argument is two-fold: good intimacy requires physical contact, and the transition phase from CMC to face-to-face is not seemless. 

Humans have a need to be touched. The hormone oxytocin isn't called "the love hormone" for nothing. While CMC may allow for people to make a good impression on each other through selective messaging, and create feelings of similarity with the receiver, no amount of mental connection will ever trump the connection felt from being hugged, and held, and caressed. Intimacy needs more than an idea or construct of another - it needs interaction with another.

We need physical intimacy.

The other major problem with SIPT is its suggestion of CMC buffering to allow for a smoother transition into face-to-face contact. Supposedly, this comes from removing initial uncertainties and breaking the awkward phase. This is almost never the case. The problem stems from the ability to be selective through CMC, forcing a construct in each user's head, only to meet and find out that half of what they thought was the case, is just wrong. Not only is this awkward, but it's more awkward than the initial meeting would have been without the CMC buffering. 

 What he seems like. 

    What he's actually like.

It is from these two contentions that I believe online relationships are not just as intimate as face-to-face relationships. Even though social media and the internet have become such a pervasive part of our lives, nothing will ever replace good ol' face-to-face contact and communication.

Mothers, Daughters and Eating Disorders

"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child." -Sophia Loren, Italian Actress

After spending last term researching eating disorders at OSU and within other colleges and universities, this paper wasn't a completely new thought to me. The idea that was completely new, was this idea of the mother-daughter relationship, and its effects on eating disorders. Removing analysis from the individual, and instead using a systems analysis (in this case, the family system of mothers and daughters), I found to be an interesting method for examination. In simple summation, the theory, Inconsistent Nurturing as Control (INC) says that the needs for mothers to nurture and control creates an inconsistency in reward and punishment that only perpetuates the eating disorder of their daughter(s).

Moms need to nurture and control

I found this theory to be a bit frustrating, specifically as applied in this study. What really surprised me about this study was the limitations it imposed on itself, and the implications thereof. First, it only used 40 daughters. For a sample size that's looking to examine an essential paradigm across the world, that seems like an astonishingly small number of girls. Second, only 2.4% of them had a single-parent (in other words, one). With the US having over a quarter of its children being raised by single parents, you'd think they'd try to get a few more daughters with a single mother. Finally, they only asked the daughters for their perceptions of how mothers acted. This almost seems criminal for a study like this. I've heard some stories from kids and what their parents "did." It's often exaggerated and just plain wrong.

As for the theory itself, it seems to have both weaknesses and strengths. Despite the failures of this particular study, it should be fairly testable. It also could have great utility in helping mothers to be more aware and purposeful in their reward and punishment, especially when dealing with a daughter with eating disorders. I don't see this theory being too heuristic, mostly because of it's scope - it's very specific. Unlike some theories where the specificity seems valid, I feel like I theory such as this one could examine family units more broadly, especially when utilizing what is essentially the cause and effect of uncertainty in parenting from the perspective of a troubled child/teen. It could possibly encompass drug and alcohol abuse, and other minor disorders. 

Overall, I like what this theory is doing - taking diagnosis away from the individual, especially just biology, and instead looking at the environment(s) that created the disability.