Index

Chat rooms (AOL Chat)

Synchronous chat rooms launched as a result of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol, which predated the internet. This enabled instant communication between numerous people over Intranets and later the Internet. AOL operated a particularly large chat service in the early 1990’s due to its strength in Internet Service distribution at the time, with subscriptions standing at 10m in 1997 (BBC, 2000). It was these large Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and early portals (e.g. MSN and Yahoo!) that first introduced chat within the Internet page rather than requiring access via a different program. This in some part made ‘chatting’ a more mainstream activity and accessible to general users who had an Internet connection.

‘Casual chat’ is a nw a well used term and one that is suggestive of the lack of commitment required. Many people would indeed leave chat rooms as readily as they joined them, without feeling a lasting communal commitment to the group. As a result they could be termed ‘online pubs’, where different people ‘hang around’ and casually socialise with others. Chat rooms facilitated greater social interaction over a shorter time period. The lack of interaction over time perhaps means that these are also weak communities for most of its users. This is because in individual chat session, there is arguably not enough time to form long term bonds and a cohesive community. There is collectively not enough social interaction suggested in the Johari (1994) window, or group motivation as Baym (1999) suggests, to grow into a strong community. However there were many regular users who returned to meet the same people. As Foster suggests these people could rightfully say they were part of a community. Community feeling to some degree could feasibly be from the member’s perspective.

Chat room interactions also “lack permanence”. People are unable to learn about a person and what they have discussed if they were not present at the time. On the contrary message boards, including its earliest forums, allow members to look back at past interactions and events. This leaves various forms of interaction accessible and opens this moment of interaction to potentially all of the community well into the future. These social interactions may present more of a group understanding than in chat rooms, where interaction is limited to people in that room at that time. As a result a stronger community could potentially form on message boards than in chat rooms. However the lack of one to one communication in message boards is less personal and may reduce the quality of this interaction. The Johari window may also suggest that it is the interpersonal links between members that is most important. Message boards certainly provided a collective history that is not captured in chat rooms.

A feature of asymmetrical temporal platforms is the length of time it takes for social bonds in message board communities to form. Understandably on message boards the socialisation process takes longer, as the time between interactions is longer than in ‘real time’. This is one advantage chat rooms offer to developing a community, providing there is sufficient group motivation to build a community....