Chat Rooms: the Distinct Medium

Daniel Bates
Dr. Farman
DTC 375
4/9/08

The term "chat room" refers to an interactive, communicative medium used to read or express thoughts of the users in usually just text and emoticons. Chat rooms exist for a variety of reasons, but the most common is to communicate cheaply to friends, family or coworkers. This is why a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found 68% of teens 12-17 use instant messaging (2006). Instant messaging / chat rooms are remediating face to face talking in a much simpler fashion. But they, by design, force users to communicate with simply their words. This creates havoc when considering sarcasm, humility, anger, pride and all the other emotions of the spectrum are greatly limited with regard to expression in chat rooms due to no visible body language. This is where emoticons come in. They are usually a luxury but help assist in displaying emotion. They however, like words, can be misinterpreted much more easily than body language can, given its innate origin.
Although chat rooms started as a simple user interface concept, code writers have since greatly expanded their interactivity. This is displayed most often in video game software where users must communicate with each other in an effective way. Time and accuracy of the message play large roles in players’ ability to complete missions or solve problems. For these purposes we see the use of preset words or phrases clickable while typing. In Final Fantasy XI, a MMORPG spanning multiple countries and languages, these presets even translate into the user’s own language, allowing cross language communication with relative ease.
Chat rooms are very unique to other media when it comes to flexibility of interface design. There are thousands of different text commands and options on different programs to better suite communication, information, and action needs. If, say a particular site is the host of practicing medical workers, it could have numerous medical jargon words preset to use, or have the ability to check a user’s education by typing “/checkED UserName.”
User biography checks are very common in chat rooms in fact. This compromises some anonymity but for the most part chat rooms are much more anonymous than other kinds of mediums. Research from Becker and Stamp of Communication Studies suggests users are more able to strategically project themselves as favorable in chat rooms while withholding bad information, maintaining given impressions (Becker and Stamp, 2005). This is most clearly shown when FBI agents catch child predators through text chat. Manipulation isn’t necessarily a bad thing between chat room participants though. Bromly writes, “Although misrepresentation can hold a pejorative connotation, it is sometimes necessary for smooth social interaction” (1993). And we know that misrepresentations are common and expected in new social interactions (Goffman, 1959).
An extremely wide variety of functions make chat rooms very different than other communicative tools, such as voice chat and telephones. These often serve just one purpose, getting your voice to someone else’s ears and vice versa. Chat rooms also differ when it comes to the theoretical limitlessness of the number of conversations comprehended and participated in by a single user. This is much like a cocktail party, except you can understand as many conversations as your mind can read. So, it is common for multiple conversations to occur and multiple topics discussed simultaneously by as little as two or three users. In comparison to say . . . blogs, communication occurs at a much faster pace. Blogs generally are much longer and make direct communication harder by design. Vlogs are very similar to blogs in their communicative capabilities, with the exception of "video responses" on YouTube (the king of vlogging sites). So, they perform a little better in the area of communication speed, but lower in communication quality. This is simply because there is no easy review process for vlogging. Each video is pretty much a one shot take, unless the user wants to edit the footage afterwards, which is very time consuming in comparison to shooting. Communication quality is usually low in chat rooms as well because the majority of users don't look up when they type and often can't edit posted script, therefore it leaves a lot of room for error. A lot of spontaneity is involved in this; there are no take-backs. It's almost a text version of talking face to face, in that regard. If you want to edit previous script, chat rooms are very difficult to work with. The most common self response to a mistake is retyping the grammatical error correctly with either of these symbols: *, ^.
Chat rooms remain an integrated part of our social society with consistent use and application. With expanding horizons of use and technologically growing developing countries, I would not expect other mediums to replace them anytime soon.

References

Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey (2006). Retrieved Wednesday, April 8, 2009 from
http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/Generational-differences-in-online-activities.aspx

Becker, J. A. H., & Stamp, G. H. (2005). Impression Management in Chat Rooms: A Grounded
Theory Model. Communication Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3, 243-260.

Bromley, D. B. (1993). Reputation, image, and impression management. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.