Impression management amongst mirc users in social relationship development

Abstract

In the endeavor of achieving 1Malaysia Concept inspired by our Prime Minister, Dato' Sri Najib Tun Abdul Razak, it is our responsibilities to comprehend the importance of impression management in order to develop the social relationship in the community. As such, impression management is a process by which individuals attempt to control the perceptions from others and it is pervasive in social interaction. However, managing impression online required more effort in strengthening unity within cyber society. In relation to that, mIRC is one of the text-based chat applications that have been used by Malaysian users for more than 10 years. Therefore, mIRC users specifically need to improved the skill of using impression management strategies namely demonstrating mastery, managing similarity, using nickname and misrepresentation identity consecutively to replace the elements of emotion, posture, gesture and the behaviour of verbal and non-verbal communication. Essentially, the frequency of impression management strategies used was affecting the interpersonal relationship especially in social relationship development. Thus, it is imperative to understand the determinants of impression management used since the online communication is primarily applied to maintain existing ties. Therefore, the study was focusing to identify the frequency of impression management streategies used amongst mIRC users. A quantitative survey method using a set of questionnaires as the instrument was used for data collection. The respondents were chosen using the purposive sampling technique. This study is timely in connectivity and interdependency between CMC and FIF culture fundamentally.