Chat-part 2

I have now been monitoring ICQ since 18 March and I have noticed something fascinating. Most of the participants 'speak in tongues' or some derivative of an ancient dialect from a remote part of the world. It reminds me of the South African movie The Gods Must Be Crazy where the main character, a bushman, speaks in clicks and other phonetic sounds.

I appreciate it's just a shorten version of the English language which has been abbreviated to save key stokes, but I wonder with kids being so tech savvy and essentially knowing how to code the written word, how will the spoken word evolve over the next few generations.



Getting past this, I have been aware of ICQ and IRC for some years now but have never used the service. I believed it to be just a waste of time or a playground for troubled people but this form of synchronistic communication has developed into a very useful tool. I'm connected with ICQ using the meebo service which is incredibly easy to use especially if you use Firefox add-ons. Meebo runs in the background of the browser, so if your connected to the web your live and ready to communicate. This type of chat would suite a more informal method of communication than email and would appear to have adequate security if you engage encryption of the traffic at the socket level. So yes I will probably continue to use the service if I can get someone to chat to. I have posted my number on the Yahoo group and on the BB asking if any will chat but I haven't received any responses to the request—maybe no one like me after my rants :(
I did pick up a copy of The weblog handbook by Rececca Blood so I hope to learn some netiquette soon.

Now talking about netiquette and getting back the chat rooms there appears to be no rules within this type of society. The language used as state above is abbreviated and difficult to follow unless your experienced (I wonder if there is netiquette siting inside the code like CSS) and if your not accepted into the discussion they others simply ignore you. It's like being in New York City without the muggers. This tactic of ignoring others is probably a survival practice of the tech savvy kids.

Just as I was finishing this entry I was luck to have a chat with a couple of NET11ers students in ICQ. It was great to catch up out of Uni in the cyberpub.