Week 1, Task 1: IRL Chat Rooms and Messenger Services.

A chat room is an online, constantly updated via "refreshing" of the page, area for people to have a conversation that is not limited by waiting for the other's reply. Depending on the capacity of the rooms, you could have over a hundred people speaking to each other at a time, which can get pretty confusing. The option for a private chat is often available, making it easier to concentrate on who you are talking to rather than sifting through lines of text with several users, not to mention the various languages they could be speaking in. Like most online services, the fact that chat rooms are available to internet users worldwide only helps to confuse matters.

As most chat rooms do not require users to upload a photo of themselves it is very easy for someone to lie about their appearance or age, among other things. As we saw in the lecture about the self, it is more often than not that people choose to make an image they think people will prefer and idolise. How can we prove the reliability of information available in a chat room?


On the other hand, MSN and other similar services like AOL messenger or Yahoo! Messenger are each much more private than a chat room. In order to speak to someone you need their account's email address, and these cannot be accessed publicly, only privately from the people you wish to speak to. When you have added them to your contact list you can speak to them in the same way as you would in a chat room, but without the conversations from random strangers. You can also put a display picture up for contacts to see, either of yourself of a current interest, and you can change your name as it is shown to your contacts.

Personally, i prefer MSN to a chat room by a mile. I am always changing my name and display picture to reflect my current interests, and I find this much more personal and interesting to do than to go into a chat room and be hit on by complete strangers. It is much safer for children who want to use the internet too, as they can speak only to people they know, and parental controls are much easier to exact upon a messenger service than a chat room that is open to the world.