Chatting

irc
MUDs
Web Chat
Instant Messaging

One of the applications which is most popular on commercial information services like CompuServe is chatting. With chatting, people log onto a service, and then everything they type into the service is sent to everybody else reading that chat topic, so the end result is a computer-mediated "conversation." Now, chatting has become wildly popular on the Internet as well. Chatting is astonishingly addictive, and probably the biggest single online time-waster there is. People have gotten so addicted to online chatting that they have ruined their marriages. I cannot honestly recommend chatting to anyone, but I do cover it here for the sake of completeness.

irc

The oldest form of chatting is irc, or Internet Relay Chat. There are dozens of irc servers on the Internet, and thousands of channels. The conversation is frequently quite childish and/or sexual, and one of the favourite activities of users who are not sympathetic to Christianity is to gain control of a channel with a Christian name, and flood it with vulgar sexual talk in order to drive the Christians out. Another favourite tactic is to lure users into a "private" channel in order to have very explicit sexual conversation, up to and including "net sex." Still, some Christians have banded together to keep control over some Christian channels, and to be witnesses to the irc community.

MUDs

An extension of chatting is called MUD. "MUD" originally stood for "Multi-User Dungeon", and MUDs were used to play fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons online. As people started to do other things in MUDs, and build online "communities", some people have changed the acronym to mean "Multi-User Domain" in order to de-emphasise the gaming aspect. Just as with the original Dungeons and Dragons, people can get addicted to "MUDding" and neglect their responsibilities in "the real world."

Web Chat

Using irc requires specific client software, so there are a number of sites which have come up with a way to enable chatting through a normal web browser. The principles and behaviour tend to be the same, but anybody with a web browser and a net connection can take part.

Instant Messaging

Many people like being able to chat with others, but they don't necessarily want to have intimate discussions with random strangers. Instead, they want to keep in touch with their friends and family. At the same time, they don't want to spend hours hanging out in chat rooms in hopes that somebody they know will pop by. One of the newer and more popular applications on the Internet is instant messaging. Using IM, a user installs client software on their computer, and every time they log on to the net, the software contacts a server to let it know that the user is online. If somebody else on that user's "buddy list" is also online, each of them is sent a short message letting them know that they are both online, and they can start chatting to one another if they choose. If chatting in a chat room is like using a CB radio, instant messaging is like having a secretary to line up appointments for you.

Instant messaging avoids many of the problems of chat rooms, but it has a few of its own. For one thing, the client software sends information to the server about the user every time they log on or off. This has the potential to give hackers information they might be able to use to break into the user's system. This is a particular problem if the user is on a local area network, because they are potentially exposing the whole network to compromise. Then too, there are some viruses which have been specifically designed to spread through instant messaging clients. Still, instant messaging has become so popular that client software often comes bundled with other software (like Netscape Navigator), and you need to do a "custom install" to prevent it from activating on your system, or else you need to seek it out and remove it.

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