Reality Bytes
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday August 31, 2000
Do you know what your friends look like? Online communities are starting to spill into offline contacts.
Graham Hutton, an expat Kiwi living in Queensland, is a dyed-in-the-wool All Blacks supporter. He liked to keep an eye on rugbyheaven.com.au (a Fairfax site) just to keep up with news. He read the noticeboard, but never contributed to it.
In Net parlance, he was a lurker.
Then one day, "someone made a comment that I could not let pass," he says. "Now I enjoy being able to have a conversation, at my leisure, about a subject I am passionate about with like-minded people around the world." And while Hutton also likes talking rugby at the pub with his mates, there's an added bonus to talking online. "There's a sense of equality, because no one knows who's young or old, male or female, expert or amateur. I don't claim to be an expert but I do love the game, so I enjoy a level of credibility with people who might be aloof in other circumstances."
Conversation tends to stick pretty much to rugby: people who play rugby, people
who referee rugby, commentate on rugby or coach rugby. There are long discussions about which is The Best Rugby Team In The World.
This is the old version of Net-chatting. Find a specialist topic, preferably one you're obsessed with. Search the Net - using any one of a hundred sites designed for that express purpose - and you'll uncover a plethora of newsgroups, mailing lists and other online forums dedicated to those endless one-topic discussions that bore everyone else rigid in the physical world.
"In this particular forum I find that all anyone is talking about is rugby," Hutton says with satisfaction. "Try doing that at a party!"
BUT IT'S NOT ALL FUN AND FOOTY.
For some, online chat provides radical opportunities to breach both physical and social isolation. Teenager Brett Williams lives on a cattle station in central Australia. Organising a night out to see a band isn't an issue. Making contact with like minds is, and in Williams' case it's something only the Net can provide. "It's pretty boring out here, so I'm on the Net a lot," Williams says. He discovered juice.net, a music and lifestyle Web site: for him, it was the closest he was likely to get to seeing a band, grabbing a coffee, or any of the other ways most of us make new friends and meet old ones.
Williams' physical isolation is extreme, but even in the heart of urban centres there are people isolated by circumstance who find online chat is a lifeline: like the mothers who meet in the chat rooms of thelounge.com.au to discuss breastfeeding, sleeping problems, and annoying in-laws.
Contrary to early dire predictions that the Internet would breed a generation of disconnected, inward-looking propeller-heads, the Net - and especially online
chat - is having the opposite effect.
"It gives you access to other people in an unprecedented way," says Paula Swatman, professor of electronic commerce at Melbourne's RMIT University. "For the people the Americans call 'shut-ins', the Net provides the opportunity to get out and the comfort of anonymity in a comparatively safe environment."
Anonymity can provide physical as well as emotional security. "Like any minority group, the gay community is fairly segregated in real life, and it's not by choice," says Paul Oh, a channel operator of #GaySocial.
The channel is open to people of all persuasions: the discussions aren't fixated
on sexuality (in fact the community is more diverse than most) but it does provide the opportunity to share experiences, and give or receive advice in a secure and non-threatening environment. "Talking with other people about their experiences empowers an individual to be comfortable with who they are and gives them the skills to deal with the pressures of reality," Oh says. It also helps people make physical connections. Individuals from #GaySocial in Sydney often organise real-life social events that reinforce the online friendships and support. "It's not about escaping reality. It's about bringing it home."
THE NET IS FULL OF SCARE STORIES, like the ones where a woman meets a guy she's been chatting with for years and he turns out to be a serial killer. After all, the Net is fundamentally different from a street corner: it's an environment where weird shit can happen, whether that's a teenager impersonating the CEO of Coles Myer, or a slavering sex-fiend impersonating a regular nice guy - or vice versa.
"There is a lot of sleaze out there," says 19-year-old Chelle Patrikis, who uses a combination of newsgroups, chat program ICQ and chat spaces like thelounge.com.au. "About once a week I receive a trashy e-mail or ICQ message that I just disregard. And a friend of mine was talking to a guy on ICQ and her phone rang. It was the guy she'd just been speaking to. She completely freaked and he said, 'I just wanted to show you how easy it would be to find you'. Stuff like that is scary."
So how do you (safely) make the transition to real world friendship? The key here is the power of numbers: the whole gang goes out for what's dubbed a "munch" by netizens, and organising them can sometimes take over a mailing list (very boring for people who aren't in the same city). Group get-togethers in public spaces can be strange when no one really knows what anyone else looks like, but generally there's a crowd at the particular restaurant with some people who already know each other and "newbies" will quickly find the people they're friends with online.
"It was weird, but also nice," says Zan, who's part of a couple of online communities and now relishes the real-world get-togethers. "It's always funny seeing someone in the flesh for the first time - like when you see the movie of a favourite book, and the actor looks nothing like the character you'd imagined.
But you get used to it really quickly because 99 per cent of the time they're just like they are online - they use the same phrases, express the same opinions, laugh in the same places. It's just you're getting it in 3D."
If you're not already part of a particular online "gang" you can exchange pics so you'll be able to recognise each other, then meet in public - and in daylight.
Chi, for example, is a 19-year-old who lives in Brisbane and uses chat rooms to both meet new people and to sort her social life. Chi's met online friends at group events like concerts, but says she made sure her first one-on-one real-life meeting was in a public place. "You know - lots of people around - no chance of getting murdered." But the two had already exchanged photos, as well as having been online friends for some time: "I was reasonably sure she wasn't some freak." Chi says it was a little weird at first, seeing her virtual friend in the flesh. "But we soon both felt really comfortable, and of course we had heaps to talk about because we'd already been chatting for so long."
The end result is that many of us now live in hybrid communities of friends we met online originally and friends we knew before. In fact, these days, it's likely that half of your friends in the real world will have a Net connection. Newsgroups, Internet relay chat (IRC) channels and ICQ chat are the new bars and coffee shops, where groups of friends meet to talk, flirt, argue, and organise social events. They're the places where existing mates introduce you to new friends, where you strike up a conversation with a stranger and discover just how much you have in common.
Paul West and Hannah Courtin-Wilson, Melbourne musicians and ska-fiends, can frequently be found loitering around the ozska mailing list or the IRC newsgroup #ska. "I use ozska to send and receive information about specific musical interests," West says. "At #ska I'd mainly talk about music, the local music scene, and upcoming shows." For him it's more about information exchange than casual conversation: it is, he says, "an important communication tool".
Courtin-Wilson agrees: "It's a great way to talk to people who come to gigs and
know my band - and a really good way to network, and to get contacts for gigs."
Professionals starting out in a new area can find themselves part of a vibrant support network. For example, there are numerous mailing lists for Web professionals, where technical questions can be posted and answered without embarrassment. Often these groups spill over into monthly gatherings, and may even lead to loose professional associations, such as the Digital Labourer's Federation in Sydney.
For Stacey Stephenson, a student of Web design, it's been a great way to network. She's a little bit shy in real life, and the anonymity of the Net gives her the courage to ask questions, and seek mentors. "I find myself chatting to others that are involved in Web design, talking about what they do and how they got involved. It's been really great - I've found a lot of people to look up to."
IN SOME COMMUNITIES, THERE ARE SO many people online that it's changed the way the whole group interacts. For example, in gothic circles, a surprising number of people have Net and computer-related jobs. Many of the regulars at nightclubs like Sydney's Ritual or Melbourne's Nightrait and Revelations also see each other online, either in the IRC channel #gothic or the newsgroup aus.culture.gothic. In fact, each week, playlists of songs, reviews of special nights and other information is posted for those who are thinking of heading out.
Niel Fulton, a regular visitor to both #gothic and aus.culture.gothic, says his work keeps him online most of the day anyway, so going into a chat room or newsgroup gives him something to do while he's waiting for downloads to finish or work to process. He says that while the remoteness of online contact can make that contact less real, it can also have the opposite effect. "In some ways online chat is
a more direct way of talking to someone," he says. "It's easier to lie or deceive someone, but it's also easier to be more open. But the very lack of body language can also place a greater emphasis on the discussion at hand."
But the bottom line, for Fulton and many others, is that virtual communities are becoming just another opportunity for interaction, no more or less real than any other. "With online environments becoming more common and more widely used, it's difficult to label some things 'real life' and others 'not real life', simply because for a lot of people the online environment is their life," he says.
Many of Fulton's colleagues frequent the same newsgroup, posting short notes throughout the day. In one classic case of crossover, a series of posts from people in the same office noting "I can see you" annoyed people in different cities who weren't part of the face-to-face crowd. These sort of sub-groups and the imperatives of real-world get-togethers have also led to the dissolution of Australia-wide chat spaces like #ozgay into regional channels such as #gaysydney, #gaymelbourne, and even #gaykogarah.
Psychologist Bob Reynolds says while some of his colleagues consider the jury still out on the benefits or otherwise of online communities, personally he agrees with Fulton. "It's just another way of communicating - there's nothing sinister or disconnected about it," he says.
In fact, while the Net is clearly allowing us to form new connections with people
we otherwise might never have met, the way online communities are evolving suggests the very human desire for real, physical contact is as strong as ever. "The technology hasn't been around that long - or at least not in a generally accessible way. So naturally these 'communities' are in a state of flux. They're also very flexible, so I would expect new 'communities' to continue to form, disband or reshape themselves according to the needs of the members," Reynolds says. "But it is interesting to see that as more and more people go online and genuine friendships form, 'virtual' communities often resolve themselves into 'real' communities. As much as people love chatting, eventually many want that face-to-face contact too."
"Regardless of the medium, the basis of all of these communities is that very human desire to make connections with other humans," Reynolds says. "And that's hardly new, is it?"
THE TECHNICAL STUFF
Want to start chatting? Don't let the jargon - or the choices - throw you. If you can send an e-mail and browse the Web then it's likely you've got all you need to take the next step into cyberspace.
+ Newsgroups: An easy place to start is with newsgroups and forums. These are places where people with similar interests gather to exchange views and give and receive information about a particular subject: from the broad-based and user-friendly forums at Web sites like thelounge.com.au (for women) or rugbyheaven.com.au (for league fans) to more esoteric or specialist newsgroups like aus.culture.gothic. They operate in a way that's very like sending and receiving e-mails, except instead of coming directly to you all the messages go to, and from, the newsgroup. It's not "live" but it does give you time to think about what you want to say, and the "conversations" tend to be confined to the subjects at hand.
Software to read newsgroups will generally come free with your Web browser or e-mail program.
You can also use the Web site Deja.com (www.deja.com/usenet)
to read newsgroups via a regular Web browser.
+ Live chat: If you want to engage in some real-time chat that's more like a face to face conversation, you have a few options. There's Web-based chat, which is dead easy to access and use. Just open up your search engine and look for "chat", then pick a "room" that sounds interesting.
Another option is IRC (Internet relay chat), a different part of the Internet again. IRC was one of the first ways to chat "live", and it's still pretty cool. It's set up around the concept of different "channels", which tend to be groups of like-minded people who talk about topics they're interested in. You need software, but this is easily downloaded, free, from the Net.
When you join a channel, you see all of the people who are online chatting in that space. You can send private messages to someone who's in the channel and have a one-on-one conversation if you want. IRC has a long history, a complicated etiquette, and even a language of its own sometimes. For the lowdown, go to www.irchelp.org.
+ Instant messaging: While live chat lets you find a group of people, instant messaging is all about individuals. The most popular, ICQ (which is just a cute way of saying "I seek you") was established to help you find your friends when they are online, and to help you find individuals with a similar interest.
The home page (web.icq.com) gives you easy instructions on how to set yourself up and find some mates - which shouldn't be too hard, since at last count there were over 70 million people registered with the network!
Again, you need special software, which you download from the Internet. Once you're registered, you can search the ICQ network for friends you know are already on the network or for people with similar interests. You can also e-mail friends and ask them for their ICQ number and add them manually. Next time you log on, the program will tell you which of your friends are also online and you can start a chat with them.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald