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Earlier columns dealt with the role of the World Wide Web as it relates to comics fandom, particularly as a medium in which weird amateur comics journalism can take root (here) and as a place where one may find message boards (here).
Chat room conversation frequently falls into one of the thirteen categories listed below.
This activity - the purported function of things like chat rooms and message boards - often falls casualty to chatter boredom, a lack of relevant information, or any of the competing chat room activities listed in this incomplete index.
Those of us who suffer those moods that require us to seek information should have some patience when noise or indifference makes such activity difficult. Recall that a) no one has to know the answer to your question(s); b) no one who knows the answer to your question(s) has to tell you; and c) no one actually has to read your question in the first place. That anyone cooperates demonstrates a courtesy on their part, not the fulfillment of some obligation.
We stand on better ground when we object to cretinous hecklers and show-offs who become verbally abusive, snide, or sarcastic because you have offended them by not knowing something they think they know. The "information gunslinger" bit comes off as a particularly trite and desperate way of building a worthless and inflated sense of self-worth. By cowing visitors who do not feel up to confronting the occasional self-proclaimed information alpha, such behavior discourages attempts to exchange information.
For those keen on discussing the central topic of the chat room, the exchange of information may represent the only valid pursuit and the single justification for going on-line. However, given that at least twelve other activities lure various chatters into their corrupting embrace - and corruption may overwhelm anyone eventually - we might resist the temptation to proclaim the illegitimacy of all off-topic activity.
Even as we learn to wink at the inevitable proportion of noise that can fill a busy chat room, we should also avoid discouraging the pursuit of information, either by drowning out real discussion or by swarming like hungry sharks around those who violate some sacred canon of fandom.
When someone enters a chat room, but declines to post, we describe this activity as lurking. Most chat room visitors spend much of their time lurking as they seek either familiar denizens or threads that interest them. Lurkers do not contribute to the noise level of the chat room; if they have little actual input to ongoing topics of conversation, at least they refrain quoting songs lyrics, ad infinitum, in block capitals.
Some chat room visitors seem to prefer to lurk, but others, particularly newcomers, may spend time lurking in order to figure out the tone of the room. Others may lurk while waiting for an interesting thread to appear.
People in chat rooms may remember the people they encountered previously, and may want to resume previous conversations. Too many possible purposes behind this exist to justify the trouble of speculating about causes.
When no one answers the question "Has anyone seen Goober666?" - generally because the answer "I haven't" doesn't necessarily provide any useful information - some folks may repeat themselves, figuring that no one read the question the first time. However, except when chat room traffic reaches a critical mass, someone generally has read the question. Therefore the follow-up question "I ASKED IF ANYONE HAS SEEN GOOBER666!" offers little more than noise, a problem in constantly-refreshing chat screens.
Where people exchange facts, inevitably some controversy may arise over the validity of some detail. Two people can believe - and believe strongly - in different versions of some fact. When this happens, one or more of these people err. Once everyone states the facts as they see them, they have discharged their obligation to Truth.
However, for some folks, the quirks of human psychology and the imperatives of the reptile-brain demand that disagreements over facts must degenerate into a battle of wills. Where two (or more) disputants desire or demand that the other yield the point and concede the truth of the opposing position, considerable beating of brows can follow.
As an example, consider the following hypothetical exchange:
DogLymph: A man can swim faster than a shark.
Goober666: Dog, what are you talking about?
DogLymph: A man can swim faster than a shark. It's a fact.
Goober666: What are you smoking, Dog? A man can't swim faster than a shark.
DogLymph: Yes, he can.
Goober666: No, he can't.
DogLymph: Yes, he can.
Goober666: No, he can't.
DogLymph: They did a study back in 1963 that showed that people swim faster than sharks.
Goober666: Okay, Dog, if people swim faster than sharks, why do they slow down and let sharks eat them?
DogLymph: People get _tired_, genius. A MAN CAN SWIM FASTER THAN A SHARK!
Goober666: No, he can't.
DogLymph: Yes, he can.
Goober666: No, he can't.
DogLymph: Yes, he can.
Goober666: No, he can't.
DogLymph: Yes, he can.
Goober666: No, he can't.
After the echoes fade, and your head stops pounding, you might ask yourself: Does this kind of dispute serve any purpose? Neither disputant gains any knowledge he didn't have before. Bystanders probably will get no more from the exchange, except perhaps for some small subset who views this kind of debate as entertainment.
Chat rooms can attract fans, even those with interests not basic to the premise of the chat room. Therefore, in a room full of comics fans, one need suffer no surprise at the appearance of fans of Star Trek, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Metallica, advertising jingles, seventies sitcoms, or any other interest that can connect people whom history and geography might otherwise have isolated.
The presence of such fans can increase the noise-to-signal ratio, especially if two (or more) chat room visitors decide to begin reciting the complete script from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in the middle of your extremely important quest for information about whether Stan Lee has moles on his neck, and if such moles (if any) have ugly hairs on them.
Quoting lines or lyrics evidently provides considerable satisfaction for some, if chat room activity, Abusenet postings, and conversation outside of electronic media provide anything like valid indicators. However, such exercises in memory and nostalgia can also become annoying to those who might have heard it once (or twice) too often. At best, they represent another source of noise.
Sometimes - and I can't really say how often - someone with whom you've never spoken in the past will want to hear about the horrifying particulars of some horrendous medical condition. This might include such horrifying subjects as your prostate problems or the entire unendurable nightmare of your endometriosis. Interest, however, will tend to increase with familiarity; people who know you tend to care more, in general, and will listen with a compassion that renders them immune to ennui or other kinds of displeasure. We can't always count on similar levels of compassion from complete strangers.
If the quality of your story or the excellence of your delivery can overpower the indifference strangers might sometimes suffer, you have probably managed to walk the tightrope well and your stories will remain in the territory of Amusing Anecdotes rather than tiresome self-gossip.
The chat room venue, however, has created a certain kind of fraud. Anonymous sympathy may invite an unscrupulous netizen to make inflated claims of suffering in order to milk bystanders for sympathy. The productions can reach into bizarre domains, such as when someone fakes his own death, assumes another handle, and announces the fictional demise to gauge if anyone actually cares.
Fraud of this kind undermines real sympathy. Someone abused through his compassion may decline to offer it so readily under similar circumstances. Therefore, an apparent lack of due consideration may reflect previous abuses more than a crassness from the target audience.
Some cyber-psychologist of a future generation may have clear explanations and remedies for the interrelated knot of proclivities pertaining to self-gossip, sympathy fraud, and demonstrations of apparent apathy. Until that time, we can continue to do what psychological professionals do for a living: use our better judgment.
Comics pros occasionally visit chat rooms. Pros, since the sixties, frequently entertain fannish inclinations that got them into the business in the first place. Pros probably never enter chat rooms in the hope that a complete stranger will ask him how to get a job in the business; they probably would not have even back during better times in the industry.
The insider information pros have makes them targets for considerable attention, often beyond what they might actually want. However, since pros, like fans, can conceal their identities with pseudonyms and irrelevant handles, when they appear under their own names they imply their consent to the attention they attract.
The cult of celebrity inclines many to fawn over celebrities, from whatever context, including entertainment, politics, and even occasionally academic, scientific, and military pursuits. Pros also enjoy diffuse fan bases composed of people interested in their work and their knowledge. Not everyone feels the need to kowtow or even show decent manners to the comics professional who occasionally pops into a chat room like a prairie dog surveying the desert; some folks seem to hope to achieve greatness by taking someone famous down a peg.
We might label the latter behavior as counter purposeful, since the visiting pro has information not always available to the Fan in the Street. If fawning serves no particular purpose, abusing the nearest pro forecloses the exploration of that information upon which he may enjoy a local monopoly.
Think of it like this: If you spray paint over the canvases in a museum, even the bad ones, someone will probably close off that exhibit - and possibly the museum itself - to the public. That accomplishes nothing, even if you don't like the paintings on the walls. Similarly, if you heckle a pro, you might close off the possibility of getting at the information he accumulates in his everyday work.
Moderators referee. Basic human limitations may keep them from refereeing during all twenty-four hours, seven days, and twelve months; these limitations may mean that sometimes their refereeing fails to satisfy all involved parties; but they do much to keep a message board or chat room from becoming toxic and insufferable.
In the absence of designated moderators, or in an attempt to assist their efforts, some chatters do attempt to help broker problems, generally for the same reasons that a board or chat room has a moderator in the first place.
Impromptu and unofficial refereeing can take on an unpleasant character when a chatter decides, against the consensus of the chat room occupants (and, possibly, the established chat room policies) to impose some arbitrary or eccentric standard. Some of us may remember the occasional chat room visitor who decides that no one should discuss on-topic material he finds distasteful ("No more Marvel talk!" "No more Avengers talk!" "No more Justice League talk!" "No more Euro-comics talk!") In such cases we should eschew the verb to moderate and use the more correct to domineer.
Teasing happens in chat rooms, just as it does on message boards. Teasing can include entertaining someone by bothering him (if benign) or bothering someone by bothering him (if less benign). The mark may have set himself up to play a target, or may serve as a target of opportunity. However teaser and teased come together, teasing can become troublesome. We can then describe it as trolling or verbal abuse.
One might liken trolling and verbal abuse, but some distinctions do separate them. When one trolls, one makes inflammatory statements designed to elicit the maximum number of hostile responses. When one engages in verbal abuse, one works with more of a focus; verbal abuse tends to single out a particular target with the goal of inducing ill-feeling in the mark, without considering the strategies suggested by allies of the abuser or of the target. When one attacks entire classes of people (by nation, religion, sex, political creed, or other category likely to include large numbers of people), one trolls; when one tells another chatter how little he feels about that chat room denizen, one personally abuses.
The world could well do without things like trolling in the same way that it could do without things like cancer.
Virtual disturbing the peace serves as a broad trash can category for consensual departures from chat room mission. Things like virtual gorefests (cyberviolence) and simulated pie or snowball fights fit into this category. Such activities vastly increase the noise to signal ratio, but they intend to do so and require enough accomplices to consider them the actions of a quorum.
Virtual disturbing the peace tends to happen in a room that has become too quiet or too self-important, though some chat denizens view such activity as their central purpose for participating in the first place.
High noise ratios, particularly when they result from collective cybersilliness, can drive away time-poor or impatient chat room visitors. This can diminish the chat room experience, but it can also improve it. Who leaves makes the difference.
Chat room visitors sometimes entertain themselves by imitating the original bearer of their handles, by changing their handles and using the new moniker as a secret identity, or by impersonating another chat room visitor by appropriating his handle.
Chat rooms can support the efforts of really inept role-players. Trolls who operate in themes, for instance, can act as a posturing plague (even if it involves a single infection). Some trolls try to work in dialect, but rather than borrowing an external coolness from another ethnicity, trolls who dabble in faux Ebonics come off as something skinny-necked, head-bobbing thirteen-year-old boys. The imitation jailhouse invective they hurl at an ungrateful world earns the indifference or antipathy that comes back to it. Other concept trolls show little more appeal.
Benign role-playing may seem silly to some - expect some teasing if you take the name of a known character and represent yourself as the same - but serves somewhat as an ice breaker and amenity even where the joke wears thin. To grudge someone the right to claim the identity his handle implies involves the same kind of lack of charity as expecting people to dress sensibly on Halloween and Mardi Gras. If you ignore it you can survive it. Fighting it just drives up the blood pressure.
Chat room users may wish to pass messages between themselves and a designated target without the fear of interception or comprehension by the chat room occupants in general. The crypto-chatter may prefer to use one of two tools, as these tools prove available and/or the occasion demands.
Private messages, where the option exists, allow a Sender to transmit something to a Receiver without letting various Bystanders in on the gag. Should you wish to ask someone if that voluble troll in the chat room actually has a criminal record for, the private message represents an excellent tool.
Argot, on the other hand, indicates some code or language that the Sender believes the Receiver can understand but bystanders can't. Foreign languages sometimes serve this purpose. Since many folks use the Web through university libraries or accounts, logistics can preselect for a more polyglot crowd; a foreign language can therefore fail as an argot because of the level of education of the bystanders.
Complaining differs from exchange of information when such complaint occurs in information-poor packets. The sentence "Tommy Manypencils sucks" conveys little more than the feelings of the speaker and almost nothing about Tommy Manypencils; the sentence "Tommy Manypencils draws incredibly hideous parodies of the human form and frequently seems unaware of the exact number of eyes typical of normal human anatomy" tells us much more.
Many things offer targets for information-poor complaint. Board policies, declining real wages, war, famine, plague, death, entropy, and that persistent embarrassing itch all can bring something to the table of complaint. The less information a complaint conveys, the less it seems off-topic.
Decadence as a theme can work for anything which has a past and a present. Therefore complaint might focus on the Decline of Comics, whether aesthetic or commercial. The American superhero comic in particular provides a fertile ground for reminiscing about the Good Old Days of yore and bemoaning the Bad Old Days of today.
Complaint, however, defies attempts to force it to focus. Since most complaint offers noise and little else to the chat room, topic doesn't always matter. However, for poignancy, one can seldom do better than to complain about the chat room itself or the people who provide it.
Carping can limit itself, however. Complaint threads tend to burn out for lack of eloquence, although sometimes they can degenerate into information-rich discussions of flaws, instead. By then, though, people have stopped saying Tommy Manypencils sucks and have drifted away into the vast arena of precisely what Tommy Manypencils does to annoy.
Clearly, with different people all bringing different interests into a chat room, you can't expect the aggregate to focus specifically on the one thing that brought you inside. A no-nonsense, focused, businesslike chat room (say, one that engaged only in Activity 1) would seem rather stiff and probably become boring except during those rare moments when someone discussed precisely those titles or concepts that interested you.
If the rainbow of other activities do tend to drag a chat room off-topic, they at least do much to enliven the proceedings. One would do well, in such a disorderly setting, to make realistic estimates of the necessary time one requires - or has to spend - before diving into the mixture of bedlam and specialized shop talk.
Again, since the number of participants can increase the value of spending time in a chat room, we might observe that a broader focus attracts more people. Extreme specialization limits the number and variety of participants. Though all of us might have a few types of chatters we would not miss if they vanished altogether, a too-narrow focus would also lock out a number of interesting people who add to the quality of time spent online.
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