I visited only two text-based chat places: IRC and Hate Bar. - by Obed

IRC is the Internet Relay Chat. They present themselves as a "world wide network for interactive chatting over Internet."

IRC is a generic shat room. There is no purpose or theme beyond talking. Over the welcome area all that was taking place was a greeting followed by another greeting. There were other other channels with specific topics. I decided to enter into one of them to see if conversations within these channels were different. They revolved around the "hi", "where are you from?" and trivial conversation starters. My participation was limited mainly to observe although I did greet people. The only instances of verbal play were related to the names these people were using in the chat room. Obviously, their name selections reflected a desire to be creative or at least to be diversed in their choice of identities.

This is what the Hate Bar says about itself: "You are alone. Nobody gives a shit about you or your problems. Save whining for your girlfriend. Here is a forum for humiliating, disrespecting and shitting on random assholes who login. The nice-guy approach did not work; it crashes 15 times a day and has no cash. This is not a place to bring your mother. This is not a place to whine about your problems. This is not a place to find a free plane ticket to the west coast; try here. If you are female and under 18 years old we regret to inform you that our sister chat room, statutory bar, is not yet complete. Keep your virginity to yourself. If you are stupid we will make fun of you. If you're an old hand at online chat, you'll find this a meaner and scarier place. Who knows, it might be mean enough to make your touchy-feelie ass get a Well account and go here." As opposed to IRC, where people just exchange platitudes the Hate Bar did foster verbal play. There was a constant used of imaginative compound words. People who assumed a variety of identities played them or reflected them in their conversational style. I decided to ask several questions to the person who greeted me. I asked her why she was greeting everybody. Why was she being friendly with all these people when this place was supposed to be about hatred and insults. She said that the whole front was whimsical and most people knew each other and they were friends. There was a sense of community and familiarity.

After reflecting on my conversations with these artifacts called chat rooms I can think of several elements worth preserving or used for the design of a technologically transfigured literary salon. Verbal play is enabled in these places much more than in ordinary life because many barriers associated with face-to-face co-presence are apparently vanished and everybody seems to be in equal footing. I can approach people and they can approach me without a concern for gender, age, social status or ethnicity. The fact that people can adopt different identities and express their imagination to go beyond our limitations in which we are condemn by one existence and one body. It is as if play allows these people to become customizable individuals as opposed to their daily lives in which they might be subjected to institutions or systems, at the workplace or when traveling to work in the morning and the afternoon, that treats them as generic members of an abstract mass composed of depersonalized entities.