I arrived in Amsterdam Sunday morning a little disappointed
not to see the city in snow as it apparently had been last week. I’m starting
to think that being told I’d be skating the canals to the office may have been
overstated.
Amsterdam was beautiful at dawn Monday morning, and it was a pleasant walk
to the Oost-Indisch Huis where ASCoR, the College
of Communication, and the Graduate School of Communication are. Many people
worked to put a number of things in place for my arrival, so I have an office
(2.11a), a network i.d., and a general orientation to others’ offices and
workspaces. I am very grateful for all the preparations. The building is a bit of a maze, but as long as I take the
staircase that does go up to where I’m going and not the one that doesn't, I should
do okay.
The day went by, first, talking with excited PhD students
Maria Koutamanis and
Dian de Vries, each of whom just recently landed their first article publications. They gave me a tour of the building (and the numerous places to get coffee -- I must have looked jet-lagged). We chatted about graduate study and
teaching, and just started discussing research ideas when it was time for a
break. Although
Jochen Peter had to be in three
places at once today,
Patti Valkenburg and I discussed over lunch what we like about good
communication research, and how we both love being professional students. Jochen,
Patti, and I are laying out plans tomorrow how to regularize meeting and
collaborating. While none of us seems too keen on rigid arrangements, we’d like
much less for our time together to fly by without taking full advantage of
it. We’re enthused.
 |
Nieuwe Doelenstraat
outside the hotel |
I’m also remembering my first trip to Amsterdam, in November
1995. I spoke in Social Psychology introducing some new ideas, unpublished at the
time, about the hyperpersonal model of online communication, and the evidence
there seemed to be in a few studies and news accounts that suggested some ways that people use the Internet to achieve intense, positive relationships. I
knew then that I would be spending the next decade or more exploring those
ideas. I didn't know they would apply to online dating, sending text messages
on pocket-sized mobile devices, or 9/10ths of what we use for online
communication today that wasn't even really on the horizon back then. (Or that
the media would ask me about
online love and Manti Te'o!)
Yet after all this time and many studies, I am still trying
to understand how people get to know one another online, how they inform one
another who they are, and what the emotional side-effects are of the ways they do so. The
ASCoR researchers excel in studying online disclosure and its consequences, and
they have created and refined
solid theoretical models and a variety of innovative methods to explore them. That’s what I’m here to learn more about--to be a student--and it's exciting to be started.
