Online infidelity and the boundaries of internet relationships

Dating

As early as November 2001, CPJ published an article in which a psychologist confronts the severity client's experience with an online relationship; the client, who is struggling with the ramifications of infidelity in the non-internet life, takes issue with the counselor's inability to take seriously a non-physical relationship with another human being, simply because it existed on the internet. (Anthony, 2001.) Four years ago, the Internet was still popularly a source for work-based communication, a nearly unreliable source of commerce, the funneling channel for identity theft and a new breed of fear, and the indoor recreation for the growing population of GenXers; but as the children of the nascent internet age reached maturity, market, and workforce, terror became the mainstay of public and civic strife, and the blogosphere took over politics, the Internet grew up. (Grey, 2001.)

Chatrooms," the source of the relationship ideologically repelled by the counselor in Anthony's social accounting, have strengthened beyond a growing part of modern culture and have become instead the mainstay of the modern, up-to-the-minute, connectivity culture. What developers and techies alike are calling "advanced social technologies" are creating a new world of apophenia, the newly coined term meaning making connections where none previously existed. (Harmon, 2005.) Suddenly, people are undergoing a new psychology of interaction, negotiating their presentation of self in mediated social contexts to an unknown audience; instant messaging, blogs, and connection sources like Friendster, the Facebook, and Match are all sources for new relationships without a requisite physical interaction.

Harmon describes the transformation as a gradual one, eased with the lack of promise posed by purely physical relationships. Inherent in her study is the fact that an online relationship may not come to fruition offline; unlike a Friday night dinner date, no one is faced with public humiliation or the awkward kiss good-bye. While her discussion centers on the future of online dating through mutual subjects, her conclusion is profitable for exploring online infidelity. Many relationships cultivated online are now such an integral part of social life that the physical fruition is longer covered in a stigma, suggesting that the relationships based in a chatroom easily extend beyond the cables, power cord, and internet code of conduct.

Pittman and Wagers (1995) examined the sources behind divorce and found through clinical reasoning that nearly ninety percent of all ending marriages are caused by infidelity. When fidelity is so inherently tied to the social fiber of society, when does the breach occur between a platonic relationship that is faithful and one that might lead to infidelity? How do online interactions govern these breaches? "Is it cheating when you're involved with someone online?," Meg Ryan casually questioned a friend in the 2000 hit You've Got Mail. The presence of social scripts for relationships governed in the physical world has not yet manifested itself online, and what Whitty calls "Fuzzy Boundaries" allowed by the internet demands further research into the connection between online relationships, offline fidelity, and the role of chatrooms. (2005)

Hypothesis

Sociologist Julie Fitness contends, "Essentially, betrayal means that one party in a relationship acts in a way that favors his or her own interests at the expense of the other party's interests. In one sense, this behavior implies that the betrayer regards his or her needs as more important than the needs of the other partner in the relationship. In a deeper sense, however, betrayal sends an ominous signal about how little the betrayer cares about, or values, his or her relationship with the betrayed partner. Hence, it is not merely the act itself that is the betrayal, but the energy being diverted to another significant other - energy and time that the partner perceives should be given to them." (2001.) the intimacy provided by a digital relationship ensures a security and privacy not witnessed in physical states of infidelity, as posed by dating two people at once offline. However, with the growing acceptance of internet-based relationships as transferable to the offline, physical world, the likelihood that an online relationship in which platonic lines have been breached and a Fitnessian betrayal already occurs, is increasingly high; when controlling for geographic limitations, careful analysis will prove that relationships online that already constitute infidelity in the eyes of the observer, as allowed by Whitty's "fuzzy boundaries," are more likely to yield relationships of offline infidelity.

Data Collection and Analysis

The design, subjects, instruments, and procedure are all based online in a direct attempt to access the studied demographic directly. Data collection and analysis will take place in two separate parts, one as it relates to the blog site and bulletin board community developed to engage online users in a discussion about protocol, actions, and transition between online and offline lives. The second set of data will be categorized and analyzed in its form as observational procedure through careful monitoring and tracking of online users engaged in chatroom interaction.

Logs will keep track of specific users for both portals. The blog/bulletin board community can be digitally created to monitor for these things already, by requiring an online enrollment form that will not only gain and sort users by demographic, but will also track and sort their interaction in the community. It is possible to create the same systematic program to track online users for observation, but if the development of such a program is not accomplished, hand-logged data will also log both their presence online as well as what happens when they are there. By keeping chatrooms open on a computer screen, the researcher will be able to note what happens even away from the computer; creating a program that sorts this users will be helpful, and specific systems like AOL that capture users information in a profile-like manner will allow for more demographic research. Integrity of the surveys online will be put into question by the ease of online misrepresentation, but every effort will be made to control for this necessary error.

Summary

The relevancy of the study is never greater; as those who are currently studying the online community and its social consistency repeatedly note, the culture is still nascent and rules for interaction have not yet been categorized. Whiles mores develop online, their offline rigidity is unquestioned. The role of social data from the physical sphere as it relates to human interaction and fidelity is still applicable online, but its relevancy in interaction must be examined. Since the internet age defines modern life, the examination of the mores held offline must be transferred online as well, as users are able to curtail and create new spheres of interaction, new relationships, and, possibly, new pertaining rules. The study will focus on examining the role of relationships online and how they transfer offline, particularly in development, transition, and ramifications.

Conclusion

Since very little research has yet been done for the online community, the study will be simplified by discussing the aspects of fidelity in an online environment for the sake of direct outreach. The methodology of the study combines with the literature about human interaction to provide a new insight into the role of Internet-based interactions in the modern day. The fieldwork, careful analysis, and interaction with the surveyed users will allow for a greater understanding of this developing portal and the way it has come to intersect society.

Review of Literature

Danah Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the SIMS program at UC-Berkeley. Her goal is to understand the new anthropology of cyberculture, particularly through the presentation of the online self in its relation to the physical, bodied self. Her papers have been published by a variety of credible sources and presented at conferences internationally, including the 2005 Media Ecology Association Conference in New York, Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2002, the University of Surrey's 2001 symposium entitled Sexualities, Medias, and Technologies: Theorizing Old and New Practicies, and the upcoming IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization. She has had editorials published in New Media and Society and Salon; the Express Mail-sponsered "Infotecture" exhibit at New York's Artists Space Gallery in 2002 showed her collaborative "Social Network Fragments" display, a social network visualization fueled by the connectivity between