Confessions of a Chat Room Addict

There are so many places on the Web today where one can go and meet people. It can usually be based upon interest, where they are geographically, and so on, and we all tend to keep to our own sub-circle depending on what it is that someone is loking for.

Since my advent upon the scene some ten or fifteen years ago, my first experiences were in my early twenties, when a family member and I had our first computer (* a 466 DX), and it was not until after a great amount of experimentation that I was finding how vast and expansive this subculture really was. There so many people from so many places, from within my own country and as well as the rest of the world. I had met people from as far away as Australia to as close as just a few towns away in my own home state. As the days passed, I was finding myself more and more engrossed with the people that I met and what was going on in their lives as opposed to what I was experiencing in my own life, and I was finding that my own life was beginning to slip away from me as I had stayed up long nights just to talk with people that I didn't even know.

But, while all of this may have been true, if I had not been an addict of chat rooms, I would never have met my current wife now of five years. For us, the chat arena was not just a place where we met. It was our own world where we could leave life behind for a while and just concentrate on the simpler forms of life.We would talk about everything from movies to our favorite sports teams all the way down to family lineage, and there wasn't anyone else that had anything to say about it simply because they didn't know me personally and they knew me only by the handle that I chose to use. Now, after nearly five years later, I still was curious as to why chat areas had such an impact on me and why my life had suddenly changed so drastically due to simply typing our messages across the screen to people that we could not see let alone hear, but rather knew them by whatever nickname they chose as well.

As time passed, I was visiting the chats less and less, and my own life was suddenly blossoming before me in ways that I could never have imagined. I had a good job doing something that I loved, I had someone to share my life with, and my greater connections with society were also blossoming as I was meeting new people and seeing new places. I had been outside of my state for the first time as I was going to retrieve my wife from her home In St. Louis so that we could be married. I was finding that life was becoming more of my own personal experiences than anything that I could ever have on a computer. But yet, I was still realizing that I missed my culture. I missed the connection that I had with people while I was in this blank space where all I did was type what was on my mind using a keyboard.

Just shortly after my marriage, I had returned to my usual watering holes very much like barflies do when they have a favorite place, and I found myself sitting in front of my computer screen as I waited for those whom I had called 'friends' come in for our daily discussion sessions. But, I was finding that I was eeing fewer and fewer people that I had come to know were arriving less and less. They had moved on, knowing that I had taken something precious that was a part of their world and made it my own, and at times, I foten wondered if they had resented me for that. I found that they were chatting with me less, and when they did chat, it was more like merely trying to get my attention rather than any form of actual discussion. I began to ask myself what had changed? Had I changed or had they? What had I done wrong to upset this delicate balance between chatter and actual person? It was a question that I had soon yet to investigate, and it was not until recently that I was beginning to see a clearer picture of what it exactly meant to be a chatter and what it was like to be part of their enviornment.

I had actually started going back to my own haunts to visit to see if any of my friends had returned, and the one particular site that was may favorite, Chatweb, (*which I had found had found accidentally again using my search engine by accident) was the very first place that I went, having hopes that someone ther would have still recognized me after so much time had passed. On a whim, I went back there, and I had noticed that the plac had become a ghost town, very much like the old Wild West boom towns had become when the gold and silver mines ran out. Mnay of those that were there were people that I did not recognize, and it was having all of the earmarks of an adult chat site, with people who merely shouted in the distance or were looking for that 'cyber one-night stand' in order to get them through the night. I was disgusted, and I knew that the days of text chatting were becoming a thing of the past as the newer versions of chatting in the form of three-dimensional virtual worlds were the next big thing.

I then started looking into these new venues, and have been a member of IMVU for a little while now, and I had noticed that it was unlike anything that I could have ever had in my own experiences where I simply lurked in the shadows and watched as the others just talked to those they chose to, and it was really not much of anything when I had come to think of it. As I entered, I was now not only a set of characters on a screen, but now i was an actual created virtual person that had their own space that they could make up however they wanted. After a few sessions of chatting in this new format, I had finally began to understand this subculture and what it was to be online chatter.

Society, as a whole, tends to look down upon others in every aspect available. It's just human nature, as anything that we cannot know or understand is instantly a threat to those that do not hang in the same circles. Chatters are no different, as they are striving to gain the same things that everyone else is striving for in the real world. People as a whole like to express ideas, whether others agree with them or not. Where the difference lies is that it is done in a place where they like to see beyond themselves, to see beyond their normalcy so that they can find others of like kind. Now, where there may be a lot of things in these worlds that happen that we are not prepared for, we also know how to react to those situations, as they are situations that happen in our own lives instead of the virtual world. We show emotion and exchange information, and learn about the world at large and that others that may be of different cultures or distinctions may not be all that different at all. They just simply live somewhere else. All that is happening is we are trying to build a better world, and the only place that we can seem to find this utopian experience is on-line, where we are all equals and there is no one better than ourselves and we it is a harmonious place where the outside world cannot get in.

I am still a chat addict today, and I have learned so much from my own experiences. Where I have made a change is to include a balance between the two, and to know that even though the virtual world may seem perfect, the real world can be just as sweet.