In a group project for another class I experienced a social conflict when dealing with face to face communication and using social networks. Half of the group preferred face to face meetings while the other half wanted to do the majority of the project through emails, twitter, text, Facebook etc. We argued a lot because people who were meeting face to face were getting all the work done while the random texts or emails from other members left them fairly clueless about what we had planned for our project and the presentation. I was on the face to face side of the group and I felt that the other half of the group was not interested in putting their time and effort into our project because they always had excuses why they couldn’t meet and would send emails asking what we had to do. This type of conflict included a number of communication breakdowns as well as incompatible interests. It took forever to get text or email responses about questions we had. Also the differences of opinion on how to present and what was required created a lot of tension amongst us. This conflict was symmetrical because we were all students in a group for a class project. No one person had the power to delegate responsibilities or punish anyone else for not contributing. The conflict was destructive in the end because it made it hard to trust those other people to do work, and for me, it created an image of them as lazy and unwilling to participate. I would never recommend them to people for a job, project, etc. It essentially split the group into two and broke friendships due to their unaccountability and lack of dedication to the group. Reardon’s strategies were used in this conflict. At first we tried to be versatile by being understanding and flexible to each other’s schedules. We also didn’t want to be too selfish but eventually became too giving when it came to doing the majority of the work with only half the group. We asked a lot of questions throughout the whole project about what were the goals, expectations and in the process we learned about other people’s attitudes and negotiating strategies. In the end we became accepting that others were not willing to put the time in for this project and no longer wanted to negotiate timed meetings or the workload, we just got the project completed for the grade and did not worry about it anymore. We could have tried to be more understanding of the style they chose to approach the project or we could have negotiated other ways to meet like through webcams that would have made the conflict less stressful but I think because everyone was so consumed with their own time schedules we all just wanted to get the project done.
6 thoughts on “Online vs Face Time”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I know exactly what you are talking about. This problem with the group assignments in school occur all the time and that’s because we all different. Some people they , like the group work, others don’t. Some are very helpful and share information, others they like the individual work and don’t like to share information. Then conflict arise, since we all are student and there is no one can solve the problem since everyboy care about getting the work done even if the work wasn’t unfair for all, this will lead to the division of the group. But despite everything, instructors insist to let the student go through the group work experience even if there was nothing common between the students because it is going to be a good experience for each of the group member to learn how to deal with people who they are different than they are inorder for them to be able to deal with any personality in real-life.
UGH. I hate group projects! Unless everyone is equally committed and equally responsible about getting work done, I always end up picking up the slack. I think people run into this type of problem even in the workplace- everyone has their own schedule and own responsibilities, and they don’t want to be bothered by someone else saying they have to do something.
I think your experience with your group project and people trying to participate through CMC is a bit different than the online communities we learned about this week. It seems like those in your group project used CMC to excuse their absence without contributing to the work. The online communities, such as the one featured in the documentary, developed real relationships and a community through mutual sharing and support. It seems like those elements were absent from your group dynamic from those individuals trying to contribute via the internet.
I think everyone can agree to a group project going this same way. I really hate group projects especially since we have the internet and more technology. People have incorporated technology in their life so much that they feel that they no longer have time to do things face to face.
I believe that there are positive aspects to both online communication and face-to-face conversations. Even though I personally prefer face-to-face communication, I won’t deny that there are some worthwhile advantages to communicating online. For example, there is the possibility of a new online community being started, uniting multiple individuals with similar interests. With these kinds of distractions on the internet, it could be a good reason for people to lose interest in what is happening around them. Such could be the case of the classmates you described as having little of an idea of what you were talking about.
I can understand the amount of stress y’all must have been under when trying to complete the project. In face to face, y’all got the answers you were needing right at that moment and didn’t have to wait for an email response. I can imagine how hard that was with half the group meeting face to face and then the other half emailing. I would have been confused. I just recently had to do a group project in one of my classes and my instructor told us we were to communicate mainly throught the discussion board. That wasn’t bad at all, sometimes we had to wait a little while for certain people to respond, but it worked out really well. I think it would have been easier on yall if yall had just communicated either face to face or completely through emails.