The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology ranging from real-time online chat over instant messaging and online forums to fully immersive graphical social environments.
History
The first online chat system was called Talkomatic, created by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley in 1974 on the PLATO System at the University of Illinois. It offered several channels, each of which could accommodate up to five people, with messages appearing on all users' screens character-by-character as they were typed. Talkomatic was very popular among PLATO users into the mid-1980s.
The first[1] dedicated online chat service that was widely available to the public was the CompuServe CB Simulator in 1980,[2] created by CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor in Columbus, Ohio.
Text-based chat
Online chat is a way of communicating by sending text messages to people in the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms such as Yahoo! use both text and voice simultaneously. The oldest form of chat rooms are the text-based variety.
Graphical multi-user environments
Visual chat rooms add graphics to the chat experience, in either 2D or 3D (employing virtual reality technology).These are characterized by using a graphic representation of the user, an avatar (virtualing elements such as games (in particular massively multiplayer online games) and educational material most often developed by individual site owners, who in general are simply more advanced users of the systems. The most popular environments also allow users to create or build their own spaces.
Some visual chat rooms also incorporate audio and video communications, so that users may actually see and hear each other.
Chat room activities
The primary use of a chat room is to share information via text with a group of other users. Generally speaking, the ability to converse with multiple people in the same conversation differentiates chat rooms from instant messaging programs, which are more typically designed for one-to-one communication. The users in a particular chat room are generally connected via a shared interest or other similar connection, and chat rooms exist catering for a wide range of subjects. New technology has enabled the use of file sharing and webcams to be included in some programs.
Games
Games are also often played in chat rooms. A historic example is Hunt the Wumpus. Chatroom-based implementations of the party game Mafia also exist.
Rules of behavior
Chat rooms usually have stringent rules that they require users to follow in order to maintain integrity and safety for their users. Particularly in rooms for children, rules usually do not allow users to use offensive language, or to promote hate mail, violence and other negative issues. Also chat rooms often do not allow advertising in their rooms or flooding, which is continually filling the screen with repetitive text. Typing with caps lock on is usually considered shouting and is discouraged.[3]
Sometimes chat room venues are moderated either by limiting who is allowed to speak (not common), by having comments be approved by moderators (often presented as asking questions of a guest or celebrity), or by having moderation volunteers patrol the venue watching for disruptive or otherwise undesirable behaviour.
Yet, most commonly used chat rooms are not moderated and users may type what they personally choose to send.
Language issues
Even today, relatively little is known about the discourse produced in on-line communication contexts. While there is a growing body of literature on sociolinguistic variation in French chat for example, other forms of computer mediated communication (e.g. discussion fora, weblogs, etc.) have received less attention.[4]
References
- ^ CompuServe Innovator Resigns After 25 Years, The Columbus Dispatch, 11 May 1996, p. 2F
- ^ Wired and Inspired, The Columbus Dispatch (Business page), by Mike Pramik, 12 November 2000
- ^ Chatiquette - guidelines for chatting online[dead link]
- ^ Rémi A. van Compernolle (2008). Nous versus on: Pronouns with first-person plural reference in synchronous French chat. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2)
External links
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