SEX, LIES AND WEBCHAT
by Julie Jones
"What's your age?" asked Dan."I'm forty six," I lied. I figured anyone using an upturned toilet seat as their icon deserved it.
"Ooh. I like older women," came Dan's razor-fast response.
Click! I'm outta there. As I watch, the chat screen blinks away to be quickly replaced by Yahoo's search-engine interface. Time to surf.
The time is 1:35 am - two whole hours had passed while I chatted. If it hadn't been for Dan and his older women fantasies, I probably would have chatted till dawn. I'd talked to a hockey team's worth of Canadians, traded insults with a fellow Brit, exchanged weather information with a girl from Sidney Australia, and shared some terrible jokes about O.J. with a man claiming to be on his defense team in LA. If that wasn't enough, we'd had a virtual caber-tossing contest (needless to say, one of the Canadians won that), a mini emotional crisis brought on by one half of a cyber-couple breaking up with her other half, an Abba singfest where we all tried to outdo ourselves in remembering the exact words to the second verse of "Dancing Queen", and been treated to a "the world is coming to an end" tirade by someone calling himself Orvil Dread. Just another night on Webchat.
Web chatting is one of the fastest growing phenomena on the NET. Digital's Webchat racks up over 1,000,000 connections a week and is constantly mentioned amongst the ten best resources on the NET. Webchat began life as an experimental conferencing service on a server PC back in the Winter of 94. It grew quickly, and soon the folks from Digital Commercial Gateway linked up with the Internet Roundtable Society (IR Society) to fully explore the possibilities of real time conferencing on the NET. Mike, Jack and Mike are the three Digital gurus who developed Webchat from a single chat room, to the multi-featured, multi-room environment it is today. Almost from the beginning, Digital has offered the Webchat software free to potential licensers, encouraging people to experiment and add new innovations of their own. As a result, chat sites are springing up all over the NET and more and more people are being introduced to the strange and wonderful world of Webchat.
Ever since I first tentatively typed, "Hello. Anyone there?" on a slow TV night four months ago, and recieved the reply, "If you're human, let's chat," I've been hooked. Cyber-chatting is fun. It's silly, risque and often hilarious. Of course there are those who meet to have serious debates over current issues, or discuss topics of mutual interest, but personally I prefer to wing it.
The real pleasure of chatting (besides the fact that if you're a woman it's good for your ego as you're often inundated by replies from men) is the fact that you can be whoever you want to. You can sit in your pajamas with furry slippers on and a cup of cocoa close at hand, and merrily type: "My friends all say I look like Sandra Bullock, and I'm currently wearing an exact replica of the dress she wore in SPEED." Who will ever know? Who will care? You can be as inventive as you wish, recreating yourself with every visit. All you need to do is swap handles and icons to change yourself from Joe, HTML programmer and all round nice guy, to Mr. Smooth, medallion man and lady killer. The possibilities are endless - you are limited only by your own imagination.
In this world, where everyone and everything is judged on face value, it's nice to find a place where appearances don't count. When everyone's persona is reduced to a thumbnail icon on a screen, other things besides looks begin to matter. Intelligence, a keen wit, charm, and kindness are the mostly highly prized traits amongst web chatters. Without them, you just might find yourself with no one to talk to. Even if you do happen to look like Sandra Bullock.
J. V. Jones is an SF writer and self-confessed NEThead. Her own humble slice of the NET can be found at: http://www.imgnet.com/auth/jjones.html
