Twelve years. One difference

Because Ullman’s article was written twelve years ago, it is difficult to draw many comparisons between her and me due to the development of other social networking tools. Although Ullman was able to foster a relationship via email, I believe it is much less common to do so nowadays. With the development of other online social devices, such as Skype or Facebook, it seems that email is not the most conducive way to establish a relationship. I feel that video chatting and instant messaging have become much more efficient tools to keep in contact and maintain relationships with others, whereas email is much better suited for business work. This is because programs like Skype allow for a much smaller time frame in between each response, so it is much more representative of who a person really is and how they would act in real life, whereas email allows the user to spend as much time as he or she wants to compose a well thought out reply. As a result, almost all of my emails are informal and are used for school or other related activities, rather than forging relationships with others. Although I do not completely rule out the thought of maintaining a relationship through email alone, I do acknowledge that it has become much less common due to the development of other more efficient communication tools.

However, one comparison that I can draw with Ullman is the feeling she felt when she talked to Karl the first time outside of the online world. It is a completely different situation when you are interacting with someone online, as opposed to actually meeting them and talking in person. For example, prior to coming to Michigan, I spoke with my roommate for the first time via Facebook. Although we only discussed trivial matters, such as what we were bringing, rather than intimate matters that Ullman had become accustomed to, it was still a unique experience to meet him in person for the first time. I feel that there is some dichotomy that exists between someone’s online persona versus their real life counterpart. The internet can only reveal so much about us; just as Ullman discovered it was an awkward experience to speak with Karl outside of the internet world, this also holds true for me as well when I speak to friends that I have grown so accustomed to chatting with online.