Sociology assignment 2 of 4

This is my second assignment for my Sociology class. Again, I uploaded it a mere 2 minutes before it was due.


Question: Go to a chat room on the internet and observe the dialogue. Briefly describe the chat room, and the discussion. Using the concepts in Chapter 4, how would you describe the type of dialogue that you observed? How did the communication compensate for the lack of nonverbal communication? What theories of interaction best describes and explains internet interaction

After searching for chat rooms in AIM, Yahoo!, and then seeing if Google had an implementation of chat rooms (Google’s implementation turned out to be too frustrating to figure out to be worth the effort), then trying to get my instant messaging client to work to join in a chat room, I finally settled on ICQ’s web page found at <http://chat.icq.com/icqchat/> that featured online chat rooms. I settled on ICQ because it has a reputation of being less mainstream than AIM and Yahoo! and it has an interface that was easier to understand than the others I explored.

The ICQ interface seemed less cluttered than the Yahoo! and AIM interface. It had a green and white motif that I found particularly clean. The room was essentially a small window roughly 300 by 300 pixels with scrolling text. There was a clear separation of the chat room and the other content. It was not without it’s faults though – it proved a little confusing as evidenced when I tried to enter into multiple chat rooms. I would inadvertently close down one chat room to join another until I figured out which section would yield another open chat without closing the first one. I finally figured out how to copy some of the chat, but unfortunately, some of the more interesting bits I was not able to capture.

The content of the conversation seemed to be essentially noise at first. There was one member quoting what appeared to be a song in all capitol letters. This person eventually left and the signal to noise ratio went down a bit. Throughout the conversations, there seemed to be multiple threads that weaved in and out. Here is one amusing thread I caught (but unfortunately was not able to capture the text):

There was a point where one member, “gqz,” was accusing me (Torrey in the chat room) of being gay. The behavior was discouraged by “Dog_Bless_You” who accused gqz of being angry and looking for negative attention (the wrong kind of attention in Dog_Bless_You’s view). When gqz asked what was a way to attract the right kind of attention, another member jokingly said suicide. This caused gqz to respond with “lol.” The humor of the situation seemed to soften the conversation and to show gqz that they would not get the extreme reaction that they were perhaps looking for. From then on, gqz was less confrontational in the chat room.

This interaction was an interesting show of teamwork to help gqz to save face. It appeared that gqz thought that by calling someone gay, it would be seen as an insult and would instigate an exchange of insults. In the parlance of the chat room (sometimes called internet slang, netspeak or chatspeak) this would be considered flame-baiting, as it was a deliberate attempt to start a flame war (flame roughly means insult). But it was not going to start a flame war, but was instead parlayed into more of a conversational tone.

Another thing to point out in this exchange was the use of lol as a response. LOL is an initialism for “laugh out loud.” It is very similar to the expressions ROTFL (roll(ing) on the floor laughing), BWL (bursting with laughter) or the more coarse acronym LMAO (laughing my ass off). It is often written in lowercase. The letters L and O are very close to each other on the QWERTY keyboard making it very easy to type quickly, and hard to accidentally mis-type. Because it can be written almost instantly, and can approximate involuntary laughter, it is essentially a gesture and not just a compensation for lack of visual gestures. I myself, will often use ‘lol’ when I am instant messaging (online one-on-one text chatting) or texting (sending text messages through a phone). It is almost an automatic reaction for me to send an lol when I simultaneously and literally “laugh out loud.”

At one point, I told the other people in the room that I was writing this essay (in fact I told Dog_Bless_You where they could find it: I will be posting it on my blog at <www.severenudity.com>). When asked what the essay was about, I mentioned one of the concepts I was writing about: the concept of how visual gestures are portrayed differently in a chat room. To my surprise, they used the North American finger gesture mentioned in our textbook

<Torrey> It’s all about how people compensate for not being able to use visual gestures
<Dog_Bless_You> not anymore
*Dog_Bless_You flips the bird

Dog_Bless_You used a method where you type “/me” and then some text to signify a non-verbal communication. For example, if you type

/me smiles at Dog_Bless_You

and your username is Torrey, it would be shown on screen as:

*Torrey smiles at Dog_Bless_You

And would be interpreted literally as a gesture.

This was an unexpected discovery. I knew about the lexicographical tradition of emoticons and expressive acronyms like lol, but I was unaware of this feature of online chatting. In the help pages, it is expressed like this:

/me <message> – Tells the current channel or query about what you are doing. Example – /me is Laughing out loud – this will return “* yournickname is Laughing out loud” to the current open channel/query window.

This command is specifically set up to emulate visual gestures. It is fascinating not only how there is a perceived need to compensate for lack of visual information, but that there is a pat solution that has been worked out for this particular problem.

An online chat room is an interesting mode of social interaction. It is mediated by a computer screen and anyone can wander in or out of a conversation. There is often a role conflict as you don’t immediately know what your role should be in any given chat session. Since there is no visual or auditory clues, it can often be hard to tell what social status, or even what group or society any given person is attached to. In a way it can be liberating, because your role is mutable where even a master status like one’s gender or race can be unknown or even faked. But it can lead to confusion as one is unsure about the norms and what is and isn’t sanctioned until a person crosses that line.
In the case of this chat room, the user “eee” was chastised for apparently being verbally abusive. This was pointed out by the user “mediocreNproud” and they pointed to a website that explained their view of what verbal abuse is and proceeded to point out what instances were evidence of the verbal abuse:

<mediocreNproud> You are a verbal abuser.
<eee> what did i say?
<mediocreNproud> You may not know it, though.
<eee> tell me
<mediocreNproud> eee, it’s not “what” you say.
<mediocreNproud> Verbal abusers insinuate.
<Dairy_Air> FEED THE BIRDS, TUPPINS A BAG ……………… !!!!!!!!
<eee> hmmm
<mediocreNproud> tinyurl.com/verbalAbuse2
<eee> that’s new to me
<mediocreNproud> Read it.
<mediocreNproud> A form of verbal abuse (invalidate the other person) <eee> that’s new to me

This was a great example of negative sanction that expressed the norms of this particular chat. mediocreNproud quoted eee (“<eee> that’s new to me”) to point to a specific point where alleged verbal abuse was taking place.

Though verbal abuse may not be tolerated at this particular instance of this particular chat room, it may be acceptable in another chat room or at a different time, depending on the values of those present. It is interesting to note the changeable nature of chat rooms in this way.

I went in to the chat room hoping to find intelligent conversation, but was immediately disappointed to find a lot of noise. But then on closer inspection, I was surprised to find a depth of communication that was more than I expected. Overall, it was an enlightening experience, but one I care not to repeat any time soon.

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