MattKennard.com

When Daniel Johnson, 24, gets up in the morning the first thing he reaches for isn’t a sip of water or his alarm clock, but his laptop computer. He flips it open and before his eyes have even adjusted to the new day he logs into his googlemail email account.

After a cursory digestion of any new mail he turns to the small box on the left of his screen that is inevitably shimmering with friends who are online doing the same thing as Dan – engaging in an online chat. He normally has a couple of conversations before he has his morning shower.

“I spend a lot of time – probably too much – chatting to friends online,” said Johnson, a media student at City University in London. “It’s no good for actually building or strengthening a relationship. It’s devoid of emotion and essentially you are just procrastinating talking about nonsense.”

The number of online chat programs has ballooned since the first appearance of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in 1997. There are now hundreds of chat sites and chat engines available at the worlds fingertips. For kids there’s Kidzworld.com, for teens there’s Teenchat.com, and for the sexually frustrated there’s adult-chat-world.com, amongst scores of others. There are also the giants of the online chat world MSN Messanger and AOL.

Over the past decade a whole generation of young people have bucked millions of years of evolution, which has trained us for face-to-face interaction, and become more at home talking to each other via text on the screen. A 2007 study found that 65% of Americans spent more time on the computer than with their family.
The fastest growing networking website of the 21st century, Facebook.com, last week jumped on the chat bandwagon and established a function that allowed digital conversing between people all over the world. It was a big step for the chat movement because facebook has a strong hold on social networking, which means that the volume of friends now directly available over the global chat ether has skyrocketed for most people.

This has been greeted with a mixture of elation and trepidation around the world. “Everyone I know in Columbia is on facebook,” said Conn Corrigan, an Irish graduate student at Columbia University in New York, talking via googlechat. “In Ireland, I would guess most of my friends are on Facebook - I can only think of three close friends who aren’t.
“I suppose it could be handy, because not everyone I know uses g-chat, so it can be useful to chat with people who aren’t on g-chat. But it also feels a bit gimmicky - if you use g-chat, then what’s the point?”

Corrigan says he is staying steadfast to gchat and will not be embracing the new facebook technology. “I actually found myself chatting to a friend on Facebook chat,” he said, “and usually I talk to her on g-chat. And both of us wondered: Why aren’t we simply using g-chat? I think I’m just going to stay with that.”
Facebook.com admit on their blog that “Chat is by no means a new concept, as instant messaging systems have been around for over a decade,” but they contend that they merely “hope Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly.”

But one of the unsaid reasons for the plethora of new avenues through which to communicate is the eternal motivation: money. “Business opportunities abound in the online chat realm abound,” said Andrew Crook, a journalist at the Business Spectator in Australia, via the new facebook.com chat function. “Business has become much less of a supplier-customer relationship, it’s all about peer-to-peer contacts. If businesses can reach into their customer’s private world, and, in a way, “become” part of that world then the mutual suspicion that sometimes accompanies the transactional relationship dissipates to a huge degree.”

Facebook.com has taken a while to jump on the bandwagon as the latest part of its enlargement program. “I think, generally, Facebook has enormous implications for business,” said Crook. “The ability to tap in to the zeitgeist, especially with the new chat function can open up strategic opportunities to pursue synergies with clued-in consumers, it’s a veritable gold mine.”

But not all is golden. The effect on the psyche of the young generation has been troubling psychologists in this new growing field of study. Steven V. Rouse, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University, has studied for a long time the effects of the Internet on interpersonal relationships.
“My research suggests that people aren’t able to form accurate impressions of a stranger’s personality if they only meet in an online setting,” he said. “When you meet a stranger face to face, you can determine fairly quickly and fairly accurately whether they are extraverted or introverted, whether or not they care about your feelings, how reliable and dependable they are, and other important traits like that.

“But in an online setting (with the exception of a webcam conversation), you aren’t able to see their nonverbal behaviors or hear their tone of voice. A person may type “LOL”, but that doesn’t mean that they really are laughing out loud.”

Before Dan goes to bed he usually has a few more chats. “It’s just addictive,” he said. “I can just go on and pass some wind verbally before sleep, it’s strangely irresistable. The facebook technology is just scary, it’s been foisted on us.” He paused (stopped writing for a minute) “Who knows where this will end.”

This post is tagged internet, socialising