Chatting

The other week, some friends and I gathered at another friend’s place of work to play video games. There were about 5 of us gathered together in one room, and one other person within earshot in another office. While we waited for the server to get everything set up between levels, we would type things on the screen back and forth. (We were playing Rogue Spear.) Sometimes witty, sometimes stupid, we just typed away. After about 3 occasions of this, I asked the simple question, “Why are we typing to each other when we’re all sitting in the same room?” Everyone made a chagrined laugh. Indeed, I wondered if it weren’t some sort of testament to how technology has changed our approach to interaction, dehumanizing it in a non-repairable way.

There have been rare occasions when I have wanted to try my hand at real chatting, so I jumped on EFNet, and tried out some obvious rooms like #quake, #linux, #windowsnt, or #beos. But the one thing that never ceases to amaze me about chatting is the surprising lack of anything worthwhile actually happening there. There are exceptions, of course, but I can count them on a few fingers, not even a whole hand. What is that saying? What does that mean? Why do I find such a disturbing lack of intelligence – or even basic humanness – in chat rooms?

Let’s take #linux, for example. If it isn’t set to invite only, the main reason I would want to get on is to ask a question. I figure someone out of the roughly 150 people on that channel on a normal night is going to know the answer to a question that I, a knowledgeable, but not expert, user would have. But, do you know how useful this has proven? I think I’ve gotten a straight and simple answer to a question once or maybe twice out of the dozen times I’ve tried. I’ve just given up. The response I usually get is nothing. I take that to mean that no one knows the answer. And, given some of the general questions I’ve asked, I can extrapolate what’s really happening.

Nobody on #linux knows anything beyond what’s in the FAQ’s and the HOWTO’s, and even that knowledge is sparse. I say that for two reasons. The first is that Linux is extensively documented. It takes an exceptional person to have accumulated more knowledge and experience than that which is represented in the documents that come with the system. Therefore, if you have a problem that the docs don’t cover, then you have a Good Question™. And that leads to the second reason: the only people who can answer a question like that are actually doing something with Linux, not sitting around in a chat room talking about doing something with it.

There’s also another issue factoring into this equation. Like some sort of fraternity hazing, those that can get Linux installed and usable for more than just Netscape browsing have paid a price, joined a club, are in a secret society. There’s a powerful psychological force involved here. Any time a person pays a high price to get “into” something, after they have completed it, they will promulgate the thing despite any contrary reasoning. It applies to operating systems and religious cults the same. (See my religion section for a lot more on this.) It perfectly explains the religious zeal of the Linux people in IRC rooms devoted to it, but it goes a step further. I’ll come back to this in a second.

But that’s not all. It gets worse. See, IRC has this thing called a channel operator. Operators are supposed to “police” the channel. You know, keep the conversation on topic. Exclude racial slurs. Douse flame wars. That sort of thing. Most channels have several. In fact, a channel like #linux or #quake might have more ops than regular users. And this leads to a certain amount of anarchy, instead of bringing the harmony for which it was designed. There are always a core of people (through means outside the scope of this rant) that “own” the channel, and will always be ops. Then there are others – their “friends” – that get given the power temporarily. “And they tell two friends, and so on, and so on.” Then, with so many people given full control over the channel, they feel they have to differentiate themselves somehow.

On any popular channel, you’re going to have rules about what is allowed and what isn’t. That’s fine. As long as there’s a place to get an FAQ so that you can avoid things that are taboo. Just such an FAQ exists for #linux. One of the rules of the channel is that you cannot post colored text. This is because it can really screw up the text-mode IRC clients that some people use on that channel. Okay. We can debate why anyone would want a text-mode IRC client when it’s simple enough to get a windowed GUI going on even the lowliest Linux box, but whatever. I can respect this.

But because some immature person wants to experience the “power” of having ops on a channel, they start making up ludicrous rules, and acting like these rules are set in stone, just so that they can feel justified when they kick someone for breaking them. I’ve been banned (kicked so that you can’t come back, usually for a day, maybe a week) for changing my nick to include “away,” which is a standard practice to show that you are away from the keyboard. Now how stupid is that? What kind of human being sits around banning people for changing their nick? Exactly.

Want to talk about Quake and it’s derivatives? Don’t go to #quake. That’s an exclusive club of people that will ban someone in a heartbeat for talking about anything other than what they want to talk about, which is usually just a bunch of vulgar nonsense. All discussion of the video game Quake and its derivatives has been abandoned long ago. Um, what’s the point of holding a perfectly good channel name hostage? It’s like getting the first .com address about some trademark name that should have a real web presence, only to put pornography on it.

Remember that point about people paying a high price for something, how that they become “proselytized” by the experience? It doesn’t just apply to OS zealotry. It also applies to channel ops in general. In this case, you have to learn about channel bots and fserves, modes, aliases, and scripts. And, most of all, network “terrorism,” i.e. exploits based on well-known Windows bugs that can crash people’s machines and defenses against them. After you’ve learned all of that, it makes you want to show that you know just so much more than the next guy, and that leads to channel abuse.

The whole business of chatting is enticing because it’s a new medium of expression and experience, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute too. However, it’s also showing itself to be a place where the anonymity of the chatter brings out the worst in people. I’ve met a die-hard chatter. He spent all day, every day in a channel devoted to pirated software, for both the PC and the Playstation. He had hundreds of CD’s of illegal software, and he used the channel for trading it and for human interaction. He wasn’t an operator, and it seemed that it was his life’s goal to attain that privilege. He begged people to let him be an op. He promised people things. He went so far as to try to turn his own company’s computers into a public storage place for this stolen software, just so that the ops would let him become one of them. However, he was let go before he could get this done because he wasn’t doing his job; he was spending all of his time on IRC!

And I think that this sort of attitude, mindset, and level of responsibility is typical in the people that hang out on these channels. When you go to a new channel over the course of a couple weeks, notice the nicks that are always there. And I mean always. That’s literally the way it works. In order to keep people from “taking over a channel,” operators must always be online (for reasons that, again, are outside of my scope). And not just that, but they usually aren’t far away from their keyboards either. I’ve checked on #quake. I’ve gotten on at work, at home, in the middle of the night, and in the wee hours of the morning just to check this, and the same people are always there, talking about nothing. If you try to talk about something, you’re usually ignored. If you try to take part in their banter, you’re usually ignored. The people who are always there, that’s their life. That’s who they are and what they do. And there’s no chance at becoming part of that unless you too are willing to devote all your time to being online. It’s really sad. Instead of a place where people of similar interest can get together to talk about something, IRC has become a place for people to spend their entire lives, and that prevents others from using channels the way it ought to be used.

I think the entire trend will continue. I see that the next Big Thing™ in gaming is online competition. But it’s not just with Quake and games like it. There’s a quiet evolution going on with games like Diablo and Everquest. They are an extension of the MUD’s and MUSH’s of years ago. All these things are coming together to form an actual simulated experience. There will come a time when we will all have headsets and maybe gloves for getting online, and it will be a 3D, real-time, audio-visual experience instead of the text-mode or gaming things we have now. The virtual community concept that AOL has been working on so hard for so many years will achieve “maturation” in this setting. Instead of text chat, you can go to rooms that represent places, like cities or nightclubs or parks, as well as interests. You’ll see and hear people instead of typing. It could be a truly cool thing. I suppose the end of this evolution would be a “jack” into which goes a plug that connects you to this virtual network, just like in The Matrix.

Unfortunately, unless something happens to change the way people understand and interact with these kinds of things, the problems with them will only exacerbate.  The extrapolations should be clear. For instance, take “cybersex” to this level. Ugh. I get sick just thinking about it. And as people become less and less experienced dealing with each other in a truly social way, they will become less and less responsible in the digital realm. In real life, when you make someone mad enough with your ignorance or stupidity, you get socked in the nose, and maybe rightfully so. In IRC, you can get away with any amount of nonsense as long as you are a channel op. So people don’t have any fear. And some fear, about losing a job, or getting hit, or doing something that would offend one of your other friends, is a healthy thing. It keeps people polite. When that fear is gone, gone too are the social standards that keep people from doing stupid things.

IRC isn’t going away. Neither are other forms of online interaction. In fact, they are going to continue to expand until they are our primary form of entertainment. But aside from this antiquated notion of “netiquette” that no one cares about any more, what’s to be done to keep things civil? That’s simple. It still all boils down to the golden rule. Just treat people online like you would want to be treated. Don’t say or write anything that you wouldn’t want read back to you in a court of law. And just be nice. Unfortunately, these ideals are becoming more and more scarce.

As an aside, I don’t know which came first – as a matter of history in the industrial age – the apathy or the technology. I don’t guess it matters now. It seems to be a self-feeding cycle. I suppose it’ll be like it is now, only to the next power. Some 100,000 channels of entertainment, and nothing worth watching. So we’ll dial in the exact thing that we are interested in, and be so exclusive in our hedonism that we’ll forget how to interact with others, and we’ll all become like that chick in The Net.

/quit Disgusted.