Research, part 2

Last week I described some research issues I'd been working on here at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) pertaining to online self-disclosure, impressions, and liking in computer-mediated communication. These issues prompted my visit here, to learn from Jochen Peter and Patti Valkenburg and their colleagues what insights and approaches we might compare or put together in order to untangle some issues in this research area. That work, as I mentioned, is moving forward with several new studies and some new ideas. But I also mentioned that I'd been probing my hosts on the matter of how and why they do things the way they do in their study of online communication. That has led to some fascinating ideas so far, and opened my eyes to new possibilities in my own work and some possible synthetic ideas.

  

Science pauses for the papparazzi

In terms of how each of us does things—research that is—I tend to do lab experiments, in which we ask a sixth of the participants to pursue goal A (vs. B), while communicating via medium X (vs. Y or Z), to examine how their communication changes and what effect it has on their attitudes and feelings toward their partners. (The other 5/6ths of the participants are allocated to the alternative combinations.)  Part of experimental processes involves being able to rule out competing explanations (other than factors A/B and channels X/Y/Z) for the outcomes we’re interested in. In contrast, although Jochen and Patti do experiments, too, they primarily use survey techniques rather than lab procedures: asking lots of people whether they are greater or lesser on characteristic 1 and 2, whether they communicate with partner type i or ii, on topics of greater or lesser intimacy, how much they use medium X or Y, with what naturally-occurring perceptions they have about the qualities of these media, and how these things affect psychological outcomes.

Why, I recently asked, do you deal with participants’ perceptions of media, rather than use different media in different contexts and see what they do? Sure, the perceptions should follow the situations and actions; but if you just ask people about their perceptions and activities, how do you know if they really know? What situation might they have been thinking about when they answered the survey? Why deal with these interesting but elusive free-floating characteristics?

Answer one, I learned, has to do with what lab experiments often miss (or questionably assume), and answer 2 has to do with how those missed characteristics can reverberate through the communication process.

Patti explained that one thing experiments can miss is that some people, in reality, do not get exposed to every media situation. Some people seek certain media and content, while others avoid it. (That’s answer 1.) The people who seek it may be different than those who do not, and, the way they are different from others may also affect how they react to media messages (and that’s the beginning of answer 2).

In experiments, everyone has an equal chance of being exposed to Condition X, but in the world, a lot of people wouldn’t go near it. And the lab reactions of people who we expose to Condition X, but who would not normally go near Condition X, don’t tell us as much about the people who would and do go near it.

These ideas are depicted and explained in Patti and Jochen’s new article in the Journal of Communication, “The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model.”  It provides a really fascinating re-shuffling of the literature and how we can think about how people deal with media differently than we mostly have done.

Figure 1 from Valkenburg & Peter, 2013, p. 226

So I reflected somewhat cynically an idea that Mike Shapiro pointed out a few years ago: From experimental lab research, I know a lot about what would happen (if the average person had Goal A using Medium X), but not much about what does happen.  Others know a great deal about what does happen, but they can’t explain what causes it (using the most rigid definition of causal explanation, by experimentally controlling participants’ exposure to factors that provide rival explanations).

We’ve started discussing how to bridge these approaches. We’ve begun identifying paradigm cases where researchers took “random” variables – factors that are theoretically defined as perceptions or individual differences which might vary normally but randomly among people – and rendered them “active” (subject to controlled experimentation) for the sake of theory-testing. In a situation such as that, if participants’ perceptions line up with the specific experimental conditions we control, great; that’s a good way to test a theory of perceptions and or through conditions.

What if perceptions do not line up with objective conditions? Now that would be interesting, too. Maybe the perceptions that we theorized to be important don’t actually mediate the processes we imagined they do. Or maybe the conditions that we theorized to cause certain outcomes, actually stimulate different perceptions, and there is some new intervening reaction that makes a difference when people do A or B, in ways we did not contemplate. Or maybe we have not been measuring perceptions, or implementing conditions, as well as we thought we did. Or all of the above. Any of these conclusions suggest more work to do to unwrap the mysteries of how people use media (in or out of relationships) and how media affect them. We have more thinking and writing to do on these ideas, but if we can synthesize a good framework it may enhance our own research, and maybe influence the thinking and research by other students like us.

Take the concept, anonymity. Sometimes researchers conceive of it as not knowing who said what online. Others use it to refer to not being seen visually online. In others’ research, it is the idea that people cannot connect your online statements to your offline self. Could be any, could be all, could be that most online communication is not very anonymous at all by some definitions. Schouten, Valkenburg, and Peter argue that it is the perception of the relevance of anonymity that might be most important. Which of these conceptions affects the relevance of anonymity? What about contexts, such as fostering your SecondLife vs. answering your university email -- don't these contexts differ in the relevance of anonymity? We could test which contexts and/or interfaces affect the perception of anonymity’s relevance, and learn what differences in definitions really count, in terms of users’ perceptions and behavior.

There was another surprise. Just as I was reading about Patti and Jochen’s new model, they were reading a model of interactive media my colleagues and I suggested not long ago, too. It was largely influenced by our study of new media and interpersonal goals, and Prof. Charles Atkin’s communicatory utility theory in the 1970s. Chuck proposed that interpersonal goals lead us to consume media in order to gather content to bring up and discuss in our interpersonal conversations. We extended the argument by saying that different interpersonal goals should affect the way we seek online (mediated) information, what we selectively report to others that we found, what we remember of it in this biased way, and that ultimately our own perceptions of things may change by the goal-driven information-seeking we used media to do.

Patti was the first to discover the similarity among our positions: Precursors to our media information-seeking (social, developmental, or dispositional) affect in which media we seek information and how we seek information from them, and these same factors affect how we process (report, retain, recall) the information. Patti noted, “On p. 187 of your chapter you write: ‘We posit that the specific interpersonal goals that prompt an individual's media consumption shape attention to variations in the content and features of the topical information one consumes, affecting its interpretation and recall.’”  

They had a model of media effects. We had a model of interpersonal interaction in a new media environment. These works have a lot in common. Our task now is to see where these models mesh and where they diverge, and whether the points of divergence can synthesize to expand the model’s reach and frame a rather huge range of communication, in a logical and comprehensive way.

Just as Prof. Peter Neijens and I had discussed in February, modern communication is such that mass media researchers can’t ignore interpersonal dynamics; people use media to tweet, chat, comment, and criticize messages that arrive via the mass media among each other, back and forth, in ways that affect the impact of mass media messages in serious ways. Interpersonal communication researchers often need to consider media more, since relationships initiate on dating sites, maintain themselves through Facebook, and coordinate themselves through texting and email, etc. If media properties affect the way relational messages play out (I think they do), they can't be ignored. But they're complicated. As Laura Stafford wrote, “Media scholars and relational scholars from many domains can inform each other. Insular inspection only serves to constrain our understanding of the increasing complexities of the ways relationships and media interact” (p. 96). 

We’ll see what we can come up with together in Amsterdam and beyond. Only you may not see too much more about it until Reviewer B says okay.

(Can someone put references in blogs? Hope so because in this work you never get too far by yourself.)

• Atkin, C. K. (1973). Instrumental utilities and information seeking. In P. Clark (Ed.), New models for mass communication research (pp. 205-242). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
• Schouten, A. P., Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2007). Precursors and underlying processes of adolescents’ online self-disclosure: Developing and testing an “Internet-attribute-perception” model. Media Psychology, 10, 292-315.
• Shapiro, M. A. (2002), Generalizability in communication research. Human Communication Research, 28, 491-500.
• Stafford, L. (2005). Maintaining long-distance and cross-residential relationships. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of Communication, 63, 221-243.
• Walther, J. B., Tong, S. T., DeAndrea, D. C., Carr, C., & Van Der Heide, B. (2011). A juxtaposition of social influences: Web 2.0 and the interaction of mass, interpersonal, and peer sources online. In Z. Birchmeier, B. Dietz-Uhler, & G. Stasser (Eds.), Strategic uses of social technology: An interactive perspective of social psychology (pp. 172-194). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.  

Research, part 1

The primary reason I came to Amsterdam is the one about which I have blogged the least: Research. Some ideas came quickly, while others—some especially stimulating ones—have just started coming into view. There is a long way to go. I am not accustomed to sharing research ideas publicly until they go through a couple of reviewers, a couple of times. Just the same, here’s a sneak preview.

Jochen and Patti

I had originally proposed to come study with Professors Jochen Peter and Patti Valkenburg because of our shared interest in, and divergent approaches to the study of self-disclose online. I’ve previously looked at this primarily in terms of how people adapt to new media in order to present themselves to other people, and how people form impressions of one another based on these self-presentations. The Internet changed how these things transpire, compared to face-to-face processes. Jochen and Patti have had somewhat different concerns. They’ve examined the factors that lead some people to disclose to others online—adolescents, primarily—and how, with feedback, this process helps individuals with their psychological adjustment, again, in ways that differ from face-to-face processes. It’s no surprise that our approaches and focal points differed somewhat: They are, at heart, media effects researchers (formerly, how do people use media and what do media messages then do to people), and I am an interpersonal interaction researcher (formerly, how do people use nonverbal and verbal cues to affect relationships through interaction).

We had each discovered that online communication elevates levels of self-disclosure people exhibit online, and that online self-disclosure appears to have stronger impacts than offline disclosure (for their work, on adolescent development; for mine, on intimacy and liking). I’ve argued that people exploit the plan-able and editable capacities of online communication in order to enhance their messages. Alex Schouten (now at Tilburg University) with Patti and Jochen argued (and demonstrated) that the relevance of perceived control over messaging is a critical factor, in a somewhat similar way. I tend to study different contexts and conditions that alter behavior; they tend to study characteristics and perceptions, and although we both cross over a lot.  Lately I’ve grown concerned there might be other explanations for online/offline differences in disclosure, and that the data we have so far don’t fit perfectly with our current thinking. But I was not sure why or how to go about investigating things. That was one of the points of coming here: to get input from a different perspective on a problem we all look at in different ways.

Dian reviews study materials

Maria and Joe review pretest results

The work on self-disclosure is progressing exactly the way it should: One experiment has started in Amsterdam, led by Dian de Vries. Another is close to commencing by Maria Koutamanis and Helen Vossen. One more study has started in East Lansing. These experiments are bringing together constructs and variables such as feedback, anticipated future interaction, dispositions, and perceptions many of which have appeared in the Amsterdam research and MSU research, plus some new ones related to self-perception, in novel combinations. One or two more studies are on the drawing board. They will test some rival explanations for the puzzles we are confronting, as scientific research is supposed to do, in incremental steps. These issues are taking care of themselves a step at a time.

Another question I have been wanting to pursue was to ask why Jochen and Patti do things the way they do. Our methods frequently differ, and our conceptualizations of research problems sometimes do, too. I have long admired how they and their associates take theories apart (mine included) and put them together in smarter, more intriguing, and original ways, and I had learned a lot from them from afar. But not as much as I could.

We have had some fascinating starting discussions about these issues. I’ll tell you more about them in another post soon. Today I am visiting Marjolijn Antheunis and Alex Schouten at the University of Tilburg. These two scholars always have interesting ideas and perspectives, and teach me things, too. I normally only get to spend small pieces of time with them at conferences or we share ideas in long emails. But a dinner conversation about a vague new idea related to impression formation has already become a brilliant hypothesis in their hands. This is fun. Way fun.

Awards and accomplishments

I keep saying I am an exceptionally lucky person, and part of my good fortune is to know some exceptionally cool and accomplished people. Many of them are being recognized this year. 

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As the year began my MSU colleague, Prof. Steve Wildman, was named Chief Economist at the Federal Communication Commission. Steve and I have been friends since our days at Northwestern, since 1992. Steve recently told me he is learning a lot in this post. Another perpetual student! 

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Prof. Johannes Bauer was recognized this year as a Distinguished Faculty Member at MSU. Johannes is now one of my department chairs, in Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media. AND he knows why Dutch canal houses are tall and narrow! My other department chair, Prof. Bill Donohue in Communication, is also a Distinguished Faculty Member. They rock. 

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Just after I arrived in the Netherlands, University of Amsterdam colleague Prof. Peter Neijens was awarded the first Career Award for a lifetime of scholarly achievement in communication science by NeFCA (the Netherlands-Flanders Communication Association).  “The award recognizes scholars who have shown substantive and quantifiable contributions, scientific as well as societal, to the field of communication studies.” Peter played a pivotal role in the establishment of ASCoR, although he points to the groundwork being laid by Kurt Baschwitz, who held the first chair in Communication/Propaganda in the UvA psychology department. 

At Michigan State, we read and re-tell the history of the first social science Communication Department in the USA. The beginning of the first Dutch department was more recent, and Peter described to me what it was like starting a program in communication science in the Netherlands. They initially met considerable resistance: “When I joined the Department of Communication in 1988, it was brand new. There was nothing: no resources, finances, infrastructure, computers, labs, institutes, procedures, or experience with grant applications, etc. However there was no lack of students, or skepticism from the established disciplines (‘a discipline that attracts so many female students cannot be serious. Do they really need time and money for research?').”

So, Peter explained, joining the Department of Communication took a lot of energy which could not be used for research, but “it was very rewarding to build the discipline and the institutes, to hire new, young and energetic faculty with high potential and see the successes grow.” Looking back, he said, "to leave the Research Methodology Department of the Free University of Amsterdam and join the Department of Communication (at UvA) was a risk, but all in all, I enjoyed it very much.” He persevered, and ASCoR is a major center of communication research in all of Europe thanks to Peter and his colleagues. 

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Yesterday we learned that Prof. Patti Valkenburg has been appointed University Professor by the Board of Directors of the University of Amsterdam. There are only six University Professors altogether here, including Patti Valkenburg. “It is the task of the university professors to give impetus to scientific developments that transcend the traditional disciplines and to contribute to raising the profile of the university,” said the news story. I think this is a major accomplishment for Patti and a real boost for the field of communication.

Patti had already been recognized by the University of Amsterdam as a Distinguished Research Professor of Communication and Child Development. At the national level, she was awarded the 2011 Spinoza Prize, “the highest scientific prize in the Netherlands.” Internationally, she is an ICA Fellow, and is one of the six most productive scholars in core communication journals in the world (the most productive in Europe).

Patti is so “down to earth” she entices people to open up and share ideas. She is generous with her time and her teaching (even with slow learners like me), and she is brilliant.

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In East Lansing, Michigan, a staff member at MSU is receiving the 2013 Ruth Jameyson “Above and Beyond” Award next week. Her name is in lights at the Breslin Center:

According to the letter from President Simon, 

She makes MSU a better place because she has high standards for herself and for others. With Prof. Doug Estry, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, they believe in doing things well; that faculty members make good decisions (even when it’s like herding cats to get them to do so); that when a student makes a mistake or has a problem it can be a golden opportunity for real education, not just a case to be closed.  She expects conscientiousness and professionalism and she gives it herself.  She takes it VERY seriously. 

And yet, if you are having an emergency, she may try to disarm you and then help you address the problem.

She makes people happy, especially me. 

Congratulations to everybody! 

Something struck me while walking to the office yesterday

I mentioned that Geldersekade, the street where my apartment stands, is narrow. It’s a one-lane, one-way road along a canal. There is a sidewalk area, sort of, but it is obstructed by parked bicycles in as many places as not. So people walk on the edge of the street. This is how I go to the university. 

A fast-moving service truck clipped me yesterday. Winged my shoulder with its passenger-side mirror. It wasn’t any more forceful than being bumped by a pedestrian. But it was pretty surprising! And it flattened the mirror against the side of the truck. Get this: The driver didn’t slow down or stop to check what happened. And it didn’t appear he went on not knowing what had happened – because he sped up! And an arm reached out the passenger window to make sure the mirror was okay and to extend it back into place! They tried to make a getaway.

But fortune played a trick on them. Up the road just past the Waag was a street-cleaning crew, and when the street-cleaners stop, no one gets past. So the truck is now stuck in a cute little Dutch traffic jam, and they look in their rear-view mirror and they see me coming.

I’m trying to decide what to do. I’ll confess to being a little angry about it. But I’m not even bruised. Because I had on my dress shoes rather than my trainers, and was not carrying a huge coffee cup, they would have had no idea I was American and most likely armed. So I had a captive audience and all options.

There were two of them in the truck and the passenger’s window was down when I got there. One looked a little nervous and the other looked a little stupid. 

I looked at the mirror that had side-swiped me and I asked them, “Is the mirror okay?”

“Oh, emmm, ja, it is okay.”

“Good!” I said. “I was worried that something may have happened to it when you hit me with your truck. Are you sure it’s okay?”

“Emm, yes I think so. It is not a problem.”

“What a relief! When you hit me with your truck, it might have gotten hurt. But it didn’t?”

“Everything is fine,” the passenger said.

The driver made a gesture to indicate how narrow the road is, then he pantomimed turning the steering wheel quickly one way then the other. “Very difficult,” he said.

“You can say that again!” I replied. “In the future, I should be much more careful! That way you won’t have to HIT ME WITH YOUR TRUCK!”

The passenger seemed pleased that the truck was unscathed. The driver has by now detected my accent, put two and two together, and is waiting for me to draw.

Staring at them, I slowly reached inside my coat, and pull it out, aiming it right at their faces.

Snap.

Snap. 

“Have a nice day!” I said.  

Part 2: Stereotypes and conversations you don't get at home, continued

In my last post I mentioned my shoarma guy, the Iraqi guy who hates Americans, and who teased me so openly about it. Shoarma guy intrigues me. I have gone back several times over the weeks to see him. When Sandy was in town I took her to meet him but I said to him, "You're not going to like her. She's American. Not German like me." The next time I went in he asked me, "Why you keep coming back here?" "I like your food," I told him. 

A couple of weeks ago after he brought out my shoarma, and no one else was there, I asked him, when are we going to talk about it? America, Iraq, his attitude? He was the one who first brought it up, after all. I asked him a question I thought he would find even-handed: What was better after Saddam and what was worse after Saddam? He said he didn't like to talk about it. He walked away. He got agitated. But after a while he came back and answered my question. 

"Before the war I had everything," he said. "After the war, I lost everything." Before the war, he didn't know what his neighbors were. After the war everybody has to know what you are. I didn't know what he meant by what you are, then he explained: He was a Christian. Before the war that didn't matter. After the war it was a tremendous problem.

There used to be an iron hand in Saddam, which was bad, he said, but after, there was anarchy, which was worse. He said, “Before the Americans came I had one Saddam. After, I had three thousand Saddams.” Everyone tries to take control, everyone tries to impose their will. It is chaos, he said, and especially unsafe for religious minorities. He moved to Amsterdam with his wife and children. Other relatives moved to America. To Michigan. They are happy in Michigan, he said. It appears to bother him a good deal. They pay taxes there, no doubt, that support America' wars. They help pay my salary, I thought, and I buy his shoarma. 

On his mobile phone, he showed me pictures he'd taken of his church in Baghdad. It was beautiful. But in the next photo it was desecrated and destroyed when local forces took control after the Americans removed Saddam's regime. He showed me pictures from inside the church of dead people. Awful pictures of half-persons who had been blown up. He asked me, quite earnestly, “What it was all for?” We both knew that the first pretext for the American invasion, the weapons of mass distraction, was untrue (if it was ever really believed in the first place). But since it wasn’t ever true, he wanted to know, what was the reason? What was the real reason America came? For what was everything taken away? For what? It is probably my own naïveté, but I didn't have an answer for him. Should I? Didn’t I help pay for it?

The pictures of his church, before and after, reminded me immediately of the desecrated synagogues of western Europe, including the one my father's family attended in Hechingen and the synagogue in Essen I visited earlier on this trip where my grandparents married, before everything went to hell. But those pictures I have only seen in museums and books, and now on the web. His pictures he took himself. In some ways they are similar. Far too similar, actually. But I am a fortunate descendant, not a witness, not a victim.

Do I understand? Could he possibly believe I do? I don't know if I do myself.

Can I say I opposed the war? 

Can I say I am sorry? Who knows. How can that matter now? I said it anyway.

This was one man, with one point of view; certainly there are others. Maybe even in Michigan. He is upset. He knows he should not hate innocent people who did not themselves perpetrate the war or decide to wage it. Hating innocent people is what the problem is, and we knew it.  Yet, he confessed with considerable discomfort now, that when he sees replays of the airplanes attacking America, he says, good.

One is not really allowed to have a frank discussion like this back home. It reminded me that in 2001, for a few moments, we tried. Americans asked, what in the world could we have done that would make people hate us so much? There was good reason to try at least to think about it. But before we tried too hard to understand anti-Americanism hypothetically, we waved the flag to defend ourselves against invaders. And that doesn't very well answer the shoarma guy's question, "for what?" 

I shared these impressions, and the story of three thousand Saddams, with my brother, Eric Walther, an astute history professor in Houston. Eric wrote back to me “I mean this sincerely, Joe, through my study of the past and growing older: The worst holocaust in history is the one that affected one's own people. The numbers really don't matter…”. 

There are lots and lots of sides to issues like this. I don't claim to know many. But I try to meet people who violate my stereotypes. Hear another point of view. Be a professor -- keep my mind open, learn something, teach something. And if I don’t wear the wrong shoes or carry too big a coffee cup, and try not to be too stupid, I try and violate a few stereotypes myself. Others' stereotypes. I hope this is what I am here to do, in part.

My disguise

"What’s the difference between a big shoarma and a small one," some new tourist asked while I was in the shoarma guy's shop one night. I answered for him: "Big is big and small is small." Shoarma guy laughed. I listened to him and showed him respect. We're getting along. 

See you in Cincinnati.

I have fallen a bit behind in blogging, and am trying to catch up. I've actually been home this week--in America--to see my wife, visit my students, and have lunch with my friends and colleagues. Drive my big car. Live in my big house... More next week from Amsterdam.

Stereotypes and conversations you don't get at home

Mary Beth

In mid-March a colleague from the States was in Amsterdam briefly, so I met up with Mary Beth Oliver and her husband, professors from Penn State, who have been on sabbatical in Germany this semester. Patti Valkenburg joined us, as did Tilo Hartmann. Tilo is a colleague from the VU University in Amsterdam, and he and I got to get to know each other a little better, which was quite enjoyable. Allison Eden, VU faculty member and MSU alum (who I'd visited in February) and her husband Jason joined us also. 

Allison and Tilo

Mary Beth told us about a discussion she'd led, in a course she taught in Mannheim, in which they discussed their stereotypes of one another: Germans' stereotypes of Americans, and American stereotypes of Germans. Mary Beth said everyone found it to be a very revealing and fascinating discussion. The kind you would not get outside of an intercultural encounter such as theirs.

I was fascinated by her observations. I initiated a similar discussion the next week in my course at the University of Amsterdam. I found out that I had confirmed two out of four stereotypes about Americans that my students harbored. First, they pointed out immediately that I had come to class most weeks carrying a extra large cup of coffee. I asked if they thought Americans always drink a lot of coffee, which surprised me since there seems to be more coffee consumption in the Netherlands than back home. They said, no, it wasn't the coffee, it was the huge cup. Americans like big things. Big cups, big cars, big houses, big everything. 

The evidence

The second perfect match I presented to them was that I was wearing trainers, that is, athletic shoes. I thought mine were somewhat stylish, but just the same, they are athletic shoes. I told them that it was not really an American thing as the big letter in on the side of my shoes was for Netherlands. That fooled few of them if any. 

I asked what else they thought was characteristic of Americans. They said I had violated one other stereotype: that Americans were stupid. That Americans had no idea what is happening in the rest of the world nor do they care, and that they are generally dumb. And fourth, that Americans are superficially and insincerely pleasant. I must either be sincerely pleasant, or superficially and insincerely unpleasant, but either way I appeared not to have reinforced their fourth expectation. I made a note to myself not to wish anybody a pleasant day. And to go back to my dress shoes next week.

They asked me what stereotypes I had about them. I said I had been told, mostly by Dutch people I knew, that the Dutch are very free with their opinions. That they can be very blunt in offering their evaluations, negative or positive. Everyone seems to agree that this is a characteristic of the Dutch. But I have not seen it myself, I said. Either I am so much like that that I do not notice it, or people have been deferential to me because I am a visitor and a professor. Or I haven't yet said terribly disagreeable yet, which could be a reflection of deference on my part. But that stereotype has not shown itself, I told them. 

With regard to Germans, I said I found a German train that did not run on time. I was scolded: That stereotype is long gone, I was told. It is not only not true, it is no longer even a stereotype. Apparently my stereotypes are stereotypes.

Shoarma

The other interesting conversation I've had involving stereotypes has been with my shoarma guy. You may have read about my cheese guys, and my meat guys, the socks guy, the nuts guy, etc. I have a shoarma guy, too. I visit him when I'm hungry late at night since his shop stays open. His food is good. I’ve probably been there five or six times. The first time I went in and spoke, he could tell from the way I speak (as can everyone) that I have an American accent. But without my large coffee cup and trainers, you can’t really be too sure. Just the same he asked, “where you from?” I toyed with him and said, from Germany. He smiled. “Good,” he said. “I like all European people. I hate Americans.” It was interesting that he would bait me this way, so I probed. You don’t love Americans, I asked? He said, do you love Hitler? Amazing how quickly he found a button to press. 

After a few moments he clarified: it's not American people, but the American government he hates. He is from Iraq. I waited to see if he would say anything else, but he didn't, as other customers came in. People would ask him, what's the difference between a big Shoarma and a small Shoarma, and he would answer earnestly, “big is big, small is small.” He has a sense of humor, and an opinion. I like people like that. He was busy the rest of the time I was there, and when I left I thanked him and said, “See you in Cincinnati.” To bait him. More about him next time.

I wore my brown leather shoes to the last day of class, and carried in a small cup of coffee. It was very much noticed. Someone asked, “Are you playing against type?” I didn’t expect to hear that expression. 

My students did really well in their end-of-term presentations of their research proposal papers, for the most part. I was surprised, not because of their abilities, but because our 8-week course had been so quick. Several of the proposals were quite do-able research projects, and some would make really nice contributions to knowledge if carried out. I hope they are some day. 

One student's proposal more or less co-opted some research I have conducted with Israeli colleagues on using online communication to reduce inter-ethnic prejudice and stereotypes. The student reviewed the theoretical issues we'd laid out in our articles, and some implementation decisions we'd derived from the theories. Aside from a change in focus to her homeland in Bosnia, I was waiting for a new idea to emerge in her proposal, and I was initially disappointed when not much did. But I've been thinking, for a masters student who knew little to nothing about these theories and methods before, to adapt these ideas and apply them to another nation and culture, is something to be rather proud of. She did a good job with it. I hope she tries it in Bosnia some day. I hope many of the students pursue these ideas some day. 

The students and teacher from Disclosure Processes in Virtual Teams and Online Relations