By JAMIE SHANKS of the Weyburn Review
Chat: 1. to talk in an informal or familiar manner; 2. idle small
talk.
The definition is simple enough; traditionally, it has meant shooting
the breeze over a donut and a cup of hot Columbian, for example.
With the advent of the Internet, however, the word "chat"
has rapidly morphed into a cyberterm describing the act of plugging
in a computer, typing something like lo! how r u? :-) and having
it appear on other screens in Finland, Australia, California or
literally anywhere else in the world.
If you're not sure what the heck those symbols and abbreviations
mean, don't worry. Even experienced Internet chatters like Amanda
Shaw had to start somewhere, too.
"You kind of catch on to them after a while," she says.
"Most of the people on there will tell you what they mean."
Despite the bad press that circulates from time to time about
this particular neighbourhood of cyberspace (primarily stories
of youths being lured into face-to-face meetings with malevolent
individuals they met on the Net), chatting on the World Wide Web
can be a perfectly safe and enjoyable activity - provided you
follow some simple, and sensible, guidelines. Amanda has been
chatting since about a year ago when a friend in the Weyburn area
invited her to try it as a means of saving on long distance phone
bills; it didn't take her very long to learn the ropes and tell
the difference between good and bad.
"People who don't know a lot about chat lines can get themselves
in big trouble. There are some bad elements. I usually chat on
the same line all the time, so I know the regulars and see the
same people," she says. "I don't think it's a waste
of time. All I hear is how bad [Internet chat lines] are. Not
all of them are bad."
Essentially, chatting involves logging onto one of a bewildering
variety of so-called 'chat rooms' or 'channels' which permit instantaneous
text-based communication with any number of other computer users
who are on the same channel. Over the past several years it has
become immensely popular. And why not? Other than the normal costs
associated with Internet service providers, there is no charge
for chatting and programs like mIRC (for Microsoft Windows) or
Ircle (for Macintosh), called 'clients', are readily available
for downloading and simple to use.
Once such a program is running and is logged onto the Net, users
can assign themselves a nickname or 'nick' and choose a server
that will link them to other users through a network that is growing
even as you read this. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the
most widely used methods of chatting and offers thousands of individual
channels to 'join'.
Ironically, the same personal computers that have long been blamed
for contributing to human isolation are now linking people together
into a massive community that allows social interaction on a personal
scale - but at a global level.
"I talked to one person from Japan once, people from Quebec,
a lot from the U.S., Australia, that kind of thing," Amanda
points out. Of course, there's always something interesting to
learn from other people, whether they're on the other side of
the world or in Montreal. "There's some good debates on there
about separatism."
The art of cyber-conversation is alive and well on the Internet,
but it has created a dialect all its own. While English appears
to be more or less the language of choice for most chatting, it
has been forced to adapt to its new environment for a variety
of reasons, the need for speed being chief among them. Since there's
little time to correctly type out everything you want to say,
punctuation and capitalization have become almost extinct. Typographical
errors are common and an arsenal of acronyms has evolved to make
things even simpler sort of.
Erin Johnson learned them on the fly just like everyone else when
she became a 'newbie' six months ago.
"Someone will say brb, and you'll say 'what's that mean?',
and they'll say 'be right back'," she explains.
Other abbreviations include lo (hello), k (okay), bbl (be back
later), oic (oh, I see), wb (welcome back) and lol (laughing out
loud - the person who typed this is highly amused), just to name
a very few. Emphasis can be placed on words or phrases like *this*
or ^this^ or by CAPITALIZING, although capitalization, believe
it or not, is considered akin to yelling and is regarded as rude.
As well, combinations of text characters called emoticons can
be used for interesting effects or embellishment. Perhaps the
most widely recognized emoticon is created using a colon, a hyphen
and a parenthesis and is viewed by tilting one's head 90 degrees
to the left, like so.
:-)
From this symbol, a vast multitude of others have evolved, including:
:-( frown
;-) wink
;-( angry
8-) wearing glasses
:-P sticking out tongue
Even after a year of this kind of thing, Amanda doesn't consider
herself a veteran.
"I don't think so. There's so many new things," she
says. Proof of that came after a brief hiatus to write her exams
last year; when she returned to her regular chat hangout, she
discovered that the jargon had changed. "I didn't know what
I was doing. You've got to keep caught up."
Keeping caught up is fairly easy during the winter, for instance,
when inclement weather can mean having a lot of spare time to
kill. And time does fly when you're chatting.
"No kidding! The hours go by really fast. It's like talking
on the phone; you don't realize how much time is going by."
Erin generally spends a half-hour every day on the Internet, either
chatting on her favourite channel or e-mailing some of the people
she has come to know, which is fast becoming a chore. "Last
night I did all of my e-mails and it took quite a long time to
write to 15 people," she points out.
Picking and choosing very carefully when - and with whom - to
exchange e-mail addresses with is a big part of chatting responsibly;
being polite and providing only general info about age or nationality
are also highly recommended. Staking out a channel for a long
period of time and becoming familiar with other users is a good
strategy, as is avoiding some of the less friendly chat rooms
entirely.
There are plenty of them, and it may take some time before you
find pleasant company. But there is much to gain.
"That's part of surfing. You've got to surf through all the
crap to get to the good stuff," Amanda says. "There's
so much information, there's so much stuff people don't tell you
about that you could learn on the Net."
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