http://www.hprf.odu.edu/chatterbox/

Ariana Poniatowski
pariana@umich.edu

Virtual Community Analysis: Omnichat, Chatterbox

Community Structure

Chatterbox is part of a larger chat system, Omnichat. Omnichat offers a range of different chat groups that have sub chat categories within the larger chat titles. Besides chatterbox the system offers, musicchat, abortion chat, book chat, religion chat, business chat, channel chat, motor chat, radio chat, sports chat, and support chat. I have visited all the other chat rooms and the demographics in all of the other places seems to be just as diverse. I wanted to join and study a group of people that went to the chat room as a from of entertainment and to socialize. I chose Chatterbox specifically because the subtitle was "no topics, and private rooms."

Chatterbox is like standing on a neighborhood street talking to anyone that walks by. When one enters chatterbox the chat line automatically starts you off in the virtual driveway, unless another room is chosen. This community is open to all ages race and ethnicity. You do not have to be a member to start chatting. It seems as though the chat line is a popular not only in the united states but across the world. Many of the international users are from Australia. Though this meeting place is open to all users, it seems to be primarily dominated by preteen to teenagers. Through my observation and interaction of the site, the user friendly, rule free nature of the chat group attracts a younger audience. One can sign up as an official member and receive an identification number. Becoming a member entitles you to visit the message board. The electronic form that one fills out to become a member becomes public information. The other users can look on the board to see what your interests are. The message board is also a place that people can leave messages, when and where they are going to be. The board seemed to be this virtual wipe off board in this virtual home environment.

The board area offers four different menus to choose from:

conference: an area that the users can post meeting times for others, it is the area that one can check all the new and unread messages that have been left.

personal profile: your personal profile can be edited through this menu, the editing is restricted by password.

total users: this is a list of all the registered users, their profiles can be accessed through here.

today's users: this is a listing that is updated each day of all the people that visited and the time they logged on to the chat line.

1. log into a room

2. type a message in the message box,

3. press the chat icon.

The number of ways to punish someone is limited, though the members seemed to come up with new ways to drive out people from what they deemed was their space. One way to drive out a person is to send them a number of rude private messages. These private messages only show up on the receivers screen. Another way to drive out a person is to simply not respond to them and eventually they will leave, as I experienced first hand. Some chat rooms are not receptive to new visitors and this drives out new visitors. Because their are not really any rules accept to be nice to the others in the rooms, another way to annoy people is to post larger pictures so that the other messages that people are trying to send are delayed. Their are also unique things that one can do with the typography. It seems that some of the regular visitors know all the tricks and only share and download the information to each other. This is another way that the regular users dominate some of the chat rooms. The type can be sent in a number of ways, bright colors, flashing, block flashing type and in excessive six.

Communication:

The communication process is real time chat that has a suspend/refresh screen. The screen shows up to ten messages at one time and then based on the number of seconds that the user determines the screen will refresh after that amount of time. For instance I set my screen to show ten messages and to refresh every 40 seconds, and then all the ten new or old responses are shown after 40 seconds has elapsed. The downfall of this is that if the user is in the middle of typing a response and the screen updates the message is lost. This tends to make the conversation short. One can suspend the screen type for as long as the user needs to. The screen will not update until the user goes back to chatting. I found that people often think the person they were chatting with has left the room because the response time too a long time. The message board has the options to look at the user profiles. When the user becomes a member they have the option to post their email. The members can access the email or the web site and therefore email can become an additional branch from the virtual community "home", as a form of communication.

Issues/Events/Patterns/Setup

Chatterbox is set up as a sort of virtual house, without any guidelines. Within chatterbox there are a number of different sub categories. The categories consist of the driveway, front yard, living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, basement, garage, backyard, sauna, or the hot tub. The conversation in the rooms is somewhat similar, small talk. Each time I enter the community I enter the driveway first. The conversation in the driveway is mostly the same throughout the day. I observed the chat room at different times of the day to see if the tone of the conversation changed. I tried to stimulate the conversation and change the attitude of the room, by asking open questions to the people in the driveway. The response was often times ignored. The scope of the conversation was narrow, due to the fact that one had to type fast before the screen changed. The nature of the chat format seemed to determine the initial introductions. If a new member was present usually someone would pair up and engage them in conversation. Due to the suspend/refresh format the conversation was brief and the questions were direct. First time users seem to struggle to get someone to chat with them and explain the nature of the room. The frequent users took over the conversations by typing in large type so everyone seemed to have to focus their attention on what that person was saying. Help, messages from first time users seemed to get lost. In this respect the people that know how to make the type this large can control the conversation and the tone of the chat. Often this is the way to yell at the others in the room When I first started to observe and learn the how the people talked in the chat rooms, I spent a lot of time begging people to help me understand what was going on. When one first enters all the different conversations are going on simultaneously, and it is hard to understand what is going on. I logged in as Arial and immediately the guys names responded with private messages to me. I thought that it was one big pick up scene. There are private rooms that people can go in to talk one on one. I was invited to many private rooms with users with male names. Many times the people with male names would not receive and response if there were people with female names in the group. People logged in and would invite anyone to chat, and on the other hand some would ask if a female of a specific age would like to chat to a gender and age specific male. This segregated the chat to two people and depending on the number of others in the room some could be excluded.

Virtual Self:

Gender and demographics of the new user seem to be quite important to some people. On line the users want to know your age, sex and hometown. Questions of looks did not seem to be frequently asked. Then the conversation can begin. I did not think that people were experimenting with gender identity. Often people would fight about which guy was sending private messages to someone's 'girl'. Threats of beating people up and finding the person committing the crime seemed to indicate that some of these people know or live near each other. I asked may people what one could do to "get rid" of an unwanted user, but I was never given a response. As far as I could find out their was no way to banish another from a room. I made friends with the people with girl names and continued to talk to them each time I logged on. I had many short talks with the guys, but most of them either used the chat room to share cool pictures or instructions, or to talk to a specific girl. Some how the topic of sex always was brought up in the group conversations. If not, a private message questioning my virginity and sexual experience was sent to me, during the course of the chat, specific questions of other people's personal lives seemed to intrigue most. I felt as though most were honest and did not have any intentions to fool the group. Most said that their age was anywhere from 12-20 during the day until 1:00am. There were not that many people that admitted to being past that age though some seemed to want to be in the early hours of the night most did not do a good job of acting older. The maturity level of some of the users was clearly evident by the reaction of the users and the conversation level. The tone of some of the chat room usually turned into a quest of who could say the most swear words at the other, or who could post the biggest picture. I have been called things that I would hope that these people would not say to me in real life. I do not like being called nasty names for no particular reason when I am in a virtual community, but I cannot do much about it. Conversation is sometimes a dead topic and who can place the best image seems to be the challenge. Competition becomes quite fierce and often evil words are exchanged. The chat room was a release for personal aggression and the conversation, or lack there of reflected this. This kind of behavior seems to attract all the people that are a certain maturity level in the chat area. A person that I talked with kept mentioning the fact that everyone in the group was a bunch of 14 year old.

This virtual community fosters this behavior by the nature of the organization of this chat area. . These 13-17 year old young adults are running this virtual household. They can meet someone talk to them, and then take the person into a private area for no one else to observe. They have the freedom to say anything they want to anyone. The users can look at pornographic pictures and put the same pictures on the web and not get in trouble for it. I am sure that these people would not say or send these things to people the user barely knows. The lack of consequence in the community cultivates this behavior that is not acceptable in Real Life. The private areas are nice to get out of the format of the suspend / refresh with all the other responses in the way, though this encourages talk that the virtual community will not hear. The language and conversation can be even more graphic and hostile because the environment that is created is one that neither the virtual or the real can see. I went to a private room a couple of times and was basically asked a question about sex, or cybersex immediately. Ii was not comfortable answering these questions so I left the rooms. I did however had a good experience, one of the times. I was new to the chat room and this guy went to a private chat area and explained as much as he knew about the chat group. A new user has to count on the other people that had problems to start and those people are willing to help the new users out.

My community has its own language that most of the usual chat members know. I have yet to figure out what LOL means but I have an inclination that it is "love on line" . I am not entirely sure because people use it in both positive and negative context. *Poof* indicated that the user left the chat room. I have yet to figure out what posting means. Once people have been talking to each other for a while then one will say posting, I think that they are posting to the private chat room. I tried to have someone answer what it was but the question was ignored. Another member told me that they were not lurking any more and were ready to chat. Lurking is when a person can observe the conversation and send private mail, but there name does not appear on the private mail list or the chat list. The People have complained about certain members that lurk and "do things" to them. Again I could not get any of the regular users to explain what one could do to another while lurking. Even though I visited often these communities have existed for a lot longer and the loyalties between members is strong. The frequent visitors remember the new users and the old do not share any information to the new people. It is as though one has to earn the right to know. The sentences are fragmented, because of the time that the user has to type a message. Abbreviations are frequently used, and a private message is referred as a pm.

Real Life comparisons:

A look into the other rooms and how they function as to set the type of communication and tone of the conversation, is quite interesting. A analysis of the nature of this particular chat room and the names of the rooms seems to be relevant. I noted the type of conversation during the day and night in most of the chat rooms.

driveway: During the day and the night seemed to be about the same kind of conversation, simple small talk. I found that an older or what seemed to be older than teen age group joined during the night time. During the day the conversation seemed to be teens at a high school and junior high schools that were taking a break between class.

foyer, garage, basement: These areas did not have many people in them, most people stopped in and talked for a bit and then went to other areas of the virtual house. At night these were the empty rooms.

living room, dining room, front yard, backyard: These areas were similar to the driveway with respect to there seemed to be regular visitors to these areas. During the day and night casual chat and took place here and then often people paired up and went to private rooms to chat.

bathroom, sauna, hot tub: These areas during the day to late evening I often experience hostile people that didn't want me in their conversation. The conversation seemed a to be only for a select few and mostly couples while the rest were made to feel as though they should leave.

bedroom: This area of the virtual house, over the other rooms, had conversation that reflected the title of the room, in one way or another. During the day this room was quite active and simple love notes were sent back and fourth. The conversation most of the time had a sexual tone. The users were within the 13-21 age range. During the night was an entirely different story. Explicit pornographic pictures were the basis of the "chat", and actually there was not any conversation, people just posted the pictures accompanied with a note to the receiver.