HOW I GOT HERE

Experience Turned Curiosity

As a child I remember the first time I used CMC in a meaningful way, and from that point on it has been ingrained in my communication habits, needs, and interests. In elementary school I would join an AOL chat with two of my best friends from school and we would type away to eachother for hours on our home desktops. From there my generation experienced text messaging become a widely used communication medium, as well as social media, from their beginnings. I loved interacting with others on the web, and I loved being able to hone my writing and branding skills in a space where distance nor time mattered. From there, as I went through my teenage years, and on into college I had experienced many positive and negative effects of the medium personally and knew the difference between face-to-face communication and CMC was staunch and this observation interested me. After taking a Human Communication Research class, I was provided the knowledge and insight to ask the questions I had stirring around in my head and turn it into meaningful discussion and analysis. Through this research class, I found out about many of the ways CMC was affecting users, and society as a whole. This led me to talking to the professor of my Capstone course about what I should do for my project, and after a quick discussion it became clear. From previous research I knew CMC had negative effects on emotions, behaviors, and effectiveness of communication, but also had a host of factors that made it appealing to users, and helpful to society. From this, I wanted to know, did users of social media, texting, blogs, ect know about these problems that the communication avenues they used everyday were causing, and how did they feel about it. This is what led me to regretful use, and wanting to know more about it. From there I researched CMC, specifically its functions for users, as well as its effects on users. In combination with a study on regret as an emotion, and anticipated regret, I arrived at a research study in which I measured overall regret in users, and tried to gauge what factors helped anticipate regret.