What's going on in chat rooms?
The rise of Yahoo!, AOL and eventually MSN, and their respective chat and instant messaging services have radically changed the nature of online “discussion” and should change the way communications professionals and academics consider these media. In the mid-90s there was still great optimism that the open, public forums would have all kinds of beneficial and altruistic impacts: that communication would be democratized. What many of us experienced in this assignment dashes that optimism squarely.
In the seven chat rooms I visited on MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!, no one participated in dialogue. These chat rooms focused on politics, primarily the national election in the US. These un-moderated venues lack any semblance of turn-taking. Anonymity, rather than democratizing, has the effect freeing people from social bonds – but it is not the bonds of social repression of speech, but rather the bonds of propriety that have been loosened.
No one in any of these rooms was making any visible attempt to explore the nature of choice. The computer-mediated medium actually destroys Isaacs’ “fluid structures of interaction”, and makes predictive intuition nearly impossible. There is no suspension, only defense, attack, and a constant barrage of attempted wittiness. The apparent goal of most participants is to barb, belittle, or beggar those who disagree until they leave in frustration. The violence is abhorrent.
Isaacs describes this kind of violence this way: “Thought that imposes or defends is violent. It applies for to try to make someone be different. It imposes from the outside a false logic that creates the violence we see in the world. And it all begins between our ears.” These chat rooms typify the problems with thought that Isaacs defines: violence, idolatry, certainty, and abstraction.
Listening is non-existent in the chat rooms, and is inconvenient even if anyone tried. Without moderation, chat rooms become an endless string of fanatical believers and fanatical skeptics exchanging literal one-liners punctuated by the entrance and departures of a myriad of surfers.
In these chat rooms, participants react to each other with snips of sarcasm at best, vulgar rudeness at norm. They constantly talk past each other, a situation made easier by the nature of interlinear conversations. Almost every participant is defensive, never acknowledging anything positive about their opponent’s position. No one wins. No one concedes.
There really isn’t a style, other than to belligerently state a point, ridicule any who disagree. They don’t score rhetorical points, because they use poor rhetoric. No one will leave the chat room more enlightened, rather they will leave frustrated, smug, or just bored.
This experience has reaffirmed my conclusions from every similar assignment at JIU: chat rooms, unless moderated and attended by individuals with the intent to dialogue, are not the place to find useful communication. The medium does not lend itself to dialogue.
Participants in the chat room seem to have arrived at their conclusions through uncritical adoption of someone else’s beliefs: their parents’, their drinking buddies’, their teachers’ or the media’s. Their ideas relate to their real life experience in that they probably do not critically examine their ideas or their real-life actions.
Work Cited:
Isaacs, W. (1999) Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York. Currency.
In the seven chat rooms I visited on MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!, no one participated in dialogue. These chat rooms focused on politics, primarily the national election in the US. These un-moderated venues lack any semblance of turn-taking. Anonymity, rather than democratizing, has the effect freeing people from social bonds – but it is not the bonds of social repression of speech, but rather the bonds of propriety that have been loosened.
No one in any of these rooms was making any visible attempt to explore the nature of choice. The computer-mediated medium actually destroys Isaacs’ “fluid structures of interaction”, and makes predictive intuition nearly impossible. There is no suspension, only defense, attack, and a constant barrage of attempted wittiness. The apparent goal of most participants is to barb, belittle, or beggar those who disagree until they leave in frustration. The violence is abhorrent.
Isaacs describes this kind of violence this way: “Thought that imposes or defends is violent. It applies for to try to make someone be different. It imposes from the outside a false logic that creates the violence we see in the world. And it all begins between our ears.” These chat rooms typify the problems with thought that Isaacs defines: violence, idolatry, certainty, and abstraction.
Listening is non-existent in the chat rooms, and is inconvenient even if anyone tried. Without moderation, chat rooms become an endless string of fanatical believers and fanatical skeptics exchanging literal one-liners punctuated by the entrance and departures of a myriad of surfers.
In these chat rooms, participants react to each other with snips of sarcasm at best, vulgar rudeness at norm. They constantly talk past each other, a situation made easier by the nature of interlinear conversations. Almost every participant is defensive, never acknowledging anything positive about their opponent’s position. No one wins. No one concedes.
There really isn’t a style, other than to belligerently state a point, ridicule any who disagree. They don’t score rhetorical points, because they use poor rhetoric. No one will leave the chat room more enlightened, rather they will leave frustrated, smug, or just bored.
This experience has reaffirmed my conclusions from every similar assignment at JIU: chat rooms, unless moderated and attended by individuals with the intent to dialogue, are not the place to find useful communication. The medium does not lend itself to dialogue.
Participants in the chat room seem to have arrived at their conclusions through uncritical adoption of someone else’s beliefs: their parents’, their drinking buddies’, their teachers’ or the media’s. Their ideas relate to their real life experience in that they probably do not critically examine their ideas or their real-life actions.
Work Cited:
Isaacs, W. (1999) Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York. Currency.
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