Stop! Think! Do you really want to do this? a newbies' site with a difference... comments welcome, mail us at ordinateur@websurfer.co.za. |
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Welcome to the ZaNet internet relay chat newbies' site.
This is not an official site. It's just a small token of our guilty conscience to attempt to make a difference.
You'll read some heavy stuff here. When we wrote this page we constantly tried to sound as level-minded and non-paranoid as possible, and we hope you'll forgive the occasional spell of melodrama. Tis true, it's a brave new world out there, and you don't always realise what you let yourself in for. Read and be merry.
This site was written specifically for a South African audience, and specifically for those meandering through the halls of the ZaNet (both the new one at irc.zanet.net and the old one at irc.zanet.org.za), and even perhaps specificially for those attending the #afrikaans channel phenomenon, but the truths written here we believe are quite universal.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leo Tolstoy
This page contains the following sections, codenamed for your enjoyment:
- You don't want to do this. Go home. [ here ] A brief summary of the warning we're trying to get across.
- Welcome to irc. Do enjoy yourself. [ here ] A summary of all the fun things you can do on irc. Tis more than just chatting and staring at a screen, you know.
- Before long your life will be screwed. [ here ] The dynamics of emotions in this emotionless medium.
- What is nice about irc? all that bad... [ here ] A summary of why irc is such fun. Followed by a short discussion of why some of those fun things can be dangerous.
- What is less nice about irc? all that bad... [ here ] A summary of why irc can be a fink. Followed by a short discussion of why some of those finky things can be dangerous too.
- Survival guide: tips from the trench. [ here ] A list of things to do to make you a completo streetwise irc dudo. So you've disregarded our plea to quit... then at least use these common sense tips.
For several reasons, chatting on the Internet is not a good idea. Some reasons are simple and straightforward (such as "you're wasting time") and other reasons become only apparent after you've been chatting for some time (such as "you're getting too involved" or "you're losing compassion" or even "you're getting completely desensitised"). Trust us, won't you? We've been there, we've done that, and we've bought the straitjacket t-shirt.
IRC is a powerful medium, and it's fun too! But generally, IRC is an unnecessary growing up stage in one's life. During one's cycle of involvement one grows and matures and eventually moves on to better things (such as real life). But inbetween getting online for that very first time, and switching off the computer for that very last time, there is a tremendous amount of trauma (and a bit of fun, too).
Initially, there is the excitement of being able to converse with complete strangers in such a friendly environment. Soon you're not satisfied with simply chatting, and you start experimenting with cool effects such as colours or sounds or whatever strikes your fancy. In the mean time you become engrossed in the lingo, and you start typing "lol" when you mean "I am laughing", or "rtfm" when someone asks a silly question, or even "a/s/l" if you want to make someone's acquaintance. Later you begin to feel like a regular chatter and you have acquired a taste for SHOUTING (writing in uppercase) and *whispering* (in one of its many forms), and you look down on newbies who have absolutely no regard for Da Rules. Then later you become bored with simply chatting and you start getting involved in channel management, and then you get into channel politics, and then you get into doing things that you'd never do in real life, such as cheating, lying, manipulating, kissing up, blackmail and other evil sins. Meantime, without your knowing it, IRC has become part of your real life. And yet, somehow you manage to separate the two lives. A strange duality develops, and you become two persons, and yet one person. And one day you wake up and realise that you've been had.
No, this is not paranoia or melodrama (okay, perhaps melodrama). This will happen to you, unless you are exceedingly clever, or very lucky, or an idiot. Like many things in life, no matter how much people warn you about this or that, you'll make the same mistakes that they made, and even though you'll learn a lot and eventually become a better person in the end (note the sarcasm), our question is: is it really necessary?
IRC provides an excellent medium for experimentation in human beheaviour. On IRC you can see with stunning clarity how people will react to various stimuli in an isolated environment. Why? Because on IRC you are stripped of your own inadequacies, and other people are stipped of their humanity. They are, after all, simply letters on a screen, waiting expectantly for you to manipulate them into various responses, and waiting for you to respond to their individual manipulations. And yet, they are people. Real people. Real people in an unreal environment. Exciting? Yes, and very scary.
Unconnected people (that is, people without any knowledge of IRC) often fail to realise the wealth of activities and opportunities that exist in a chat medium. For them it's just typing short messages on a screen. But we know better, don't we? IRC is all about conversation... or is there more to it still?
Probably the very first thing that you will do on IRC is to join a channel and watch with rapture the mix match of conversation threads running endlessly off your screen. This watching is called "lurking", and it's a very good idea to lurk for a while just to see what the current topics of conversation are. Most people on IRC don't mind lurkers, although some of the more paranoid souls out there might expect you to say "hello" or "man, the rugby was a fiasco" or something suchlike.
The second thing you're likely to do is to join in in the main topic of conversation. You would do this by making a comment on something that has been said, or by making a comment in line with existing comments. If someone is interested in your comment, they may reply to your comment, and then you can reply to their comment (or not), and this is how general chatting works. When you've become a regular visitor to the channel you can even start a conversation from scratch.
The third level of IRC usage is private chatting. This involves a one-on-one session with another chatter. When you've progressed to the private chatting stage you are set on the way to total destruction, for it is in the private chats that battles are fought and enemies are made. Why does one want to chat privately with a complete stranger? That is the crux of the matter, and it is that point that defines your purpose on IRC.
On the one hand you may simply want to chat without interference from other chatters. You may want to be able to devote an entire screenspace to one person. Perhaps you are tired of too many voices making comments on your comments, and you prefer a one-on-one sparring session. Private chats occur for the following reasons:
You can ask questions, be helpful, take part in discussions about topics, learn a bit more about other people and other cultures, learn how to argue, and you can learn politics.
Truly, chatting on IRC has so much wonderful potential. It is an advanced and complex form of information interchange. Through mail, post and e-mail we've learned how to communicate the central issues of a message, by cutting away the personal and emotional parts and stripping the message to bare words on a page. IRC brings back the humanity into written communication, precisely because it is done in realtime. But with this advantage comes the horrible truth -- that emotional communication is far too complex for the written word, that humanity is in fact a drag on efficiency, and that any methods of trying to overcome the impersonality of text eventually fails. Where once we believed that we have found the ideal medium for personal text communication, we have discovered that in fact we've not taken the best of the two worlds, but the worst.
What makes chatting so addictive? We'll tell you why. It gives you instant access to an instant circle of friends where you can instantly chat and share and enjoy good company. No need to bother with intricate protocols and manners and beheaviour traditions. You don't need to wait until you've sat down on the couch and said "how are you, I'm fine, nice day, pity about the rugby, how's your mother doing, blah blah blah". You don't need to pause and listen. You don't need to dress up or brush your teeth.
You don't need to know someone well before you can share your deepest secrets with them. No-one will reject you because you are fat or ugly or because you have a squeeky voice or because you take a few seconds to think up a witty reply. No-one will notice if you are disinterested in what they are sharing with you.
No-one expects you to follow those rules that say that you should look remorseful for at least an hour after you've done something wrong or said something stupid or rash. You don't have to get up and leave if you've offended someone. You don't have to be careful with what you say to whom for fear that their dad or mom would throw you out (or their spouse, for that matter).
WARNING... heavy stuff ahead...
Do you see the trend? Can you spot the danger? No? It's so easy to overlook the hidden gollums that lurk within these lines of instance and ease. We think we are free, and we are right... but what if... what if we gained our freedom by throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Let's be frank: we may think that we've stripped our lives of useless mannerisms and worthless time consuming etiquette, and we often don't realise that many of these traditional values of patience and restraint are actually there for our protection. We think that we've progressed from slavery into freedom, but we've really just progressed from order to chaos.
WARNING... heavy stuff behind...
Your instant access to an instant circle of instant friends where you can instantly share your hopes and fears (or instantly kla about the sloppy rugby), is a dangerous toy. We speak from experience. Apart from the obvious danger that that you can unknowingly give personal information to a psycho killer, there are also more mundane dangers.
When you share, you give something of yourself. When you talk about things, silly or serious, you give something of yourself. You become emotionally involved with the people you talk to. You may not realise this at first, and this is the danger. You may not realise that by chatting so instantly you are also draining your emotional resources far more quickly. And because there is no commitment from either your side or the other person's side, there is no returnfeed. The measure of commitment or involvement on IRC is uneven. Either you end up giving too much, or taking too much.
You give support and take support, you take a burdon upon yourself and give a burden to someone else to carry, and all of this happens immediately and instantly. There is no depth. There is no waiting period for healing, for recuperation. A strange duality (sounds familiar?) ensues... you feel too much for people, and you feel too little for people.
In the end you care too much, and you don't care at all. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Your inner relationships swing out of balance. You get hurt, you comfort, you hurt people, and you get comforted. Up and down, in and out, faster and faster and faster. In the end, you learn how to hate, not love, and you learn how to panic, not trust, and when you have learned how to deal with these scars, you will have become "a better person".
Why do we learn hatred and distrust on IRC? The reason is simpler than one might expect. When we interact in real life we are unaware of the hidden faults and inadequacies of the people we deal with. We tend to see them as more perfect than they are, and we are more lenient to overlook their short comings. In fact, our brains deliberately filter out the rough edges in people. That is why we trust them, and like them. But on IRC the protecting shields that hide our true selves from the world is stripped away, and we see people bare and imperfect. Their actions are not covered by their outward appearance, because on IRC there is no outward appearance. Previously we called IRC "a laboratory of human beheaviour in an isolated environment". Static and interference is a good thing in this transmission of ourselves, but a clinically cold and pure transmission hurts.
Virtual reality is a fake reality. We are real (unvirtual) humans in a virtual world -- somewhere something has to come loose. It cannot be healthy.
Like most modern things, IRC can be described in terms of advantages and disadvantages. Cars get you from A to B quickly (advantage) and pollutes the environment (disadvantage). E-mail gets a message there quickly (advantage) and renders humour imperfectly (disadvantage).
What is nice about IRC...
How is this dangerous?
Your schedule is upset. Just because you can chat any time of the day means that later you actually do chat any time of the day, even at times when no other sane person is awake. And let us tell you what will happen eventually: you'll meet a really interesting person in a timezone just a tad later than your bedtime, and you'll end up staying up later just to meet that person. Or one day you'll connect in the morning, and meet a very nice person... and then you adjust your schedule accordingly. And because you arrive at work later you have to leave later, and you eat supper later, and in the end your entire schedule is upset. Genuine.
Because you are more personal more quickly, you reveal bits about yourself that you would normally not reveal. This may cause friction with your spouse, or it may enstrange friends. Also, you may discover some truths about yourself that you wanted to hide from even yourself. Being more personal also means trusting more, and trust is supposed to be an expensive commodity. When expensive things come cheaply, they tend to lose their value, and they also tend to lose their usefulness. Eeek.
Suddenly you can talk about sex even though in real life you are a dominee. Be careful that your IRC personality does not become a real personality. Yes, you can be more free in the channel, but freedom is like a creeper plant... it creeps into other parts of your life without your realising it.
There is no commitment, and the absense of commitment has some scary consequences. Apart from the fact that you can get hurt when your trust gets betrayed, you may also end up losing any regard for commitment and it's value in real life. In a world where commitment is expected, we tend to make an effort even when we don't feel like it, but in a world where there is no commitment, we easily fall into the trap of disregard when we simply don't feel like giving.
Yes, you can try before you buy on IRC, where friendships are concerned, but be careful that friendship does not become a cheap thing that can be replaced or thrown away when you're tired of it. We said there is no commitment on IRC -- make sure that there is commitment in real life.
You can be yourself. But do you know yourself? If you are a different "yourself" on IRC than in real life, perhaps you should consider the long term advantages of making an effort in real life to implement your real self. But, this is difficult and hard work. IRC is easy. Get the point?
IRC has some distinct disadvantages. When we talk about disadvantages here we don't mean hidden dangers, but obvious things.
What is less nice about IRC...
How is this dangerous?
The main dangers with the disadvantages of IRC is that your bank balance might become a disbalance, that your time with friends and family might become time with screen and mouse, that you can get wrist cramp from all the typing, and that you can get very frustrated with the inadequacies of the chatting medium.
Aag, hell. So you've decided to ignore all our pleas and to continue with IRC anyway. Okay, fair enough. This is a free country and you are free to make any number of mistakes. But, if you should choose to make the mistake of taking up IRC or internet chatting, do take our advice and perhaps you'll survive the cyberjungle.
Session Start: Thu Nov 25 20:11:21 1999
[25/11 20:11:21] <Jilll> Hi there! I can see that your nickname is not yet registered... if you are new to IRC, why not take a peek at my paranoid look at IRC, at http://www.geocities.com/lacialacia/newbie/.
Session Close: Thu Nov 25 20:11:22 1999
Look familiar? Between 1999-11-19 and 1999-12-25 we initiated 157 unsolicited private chats to advertise this site. By strict policy, we only initiated chats with people who joined our channel and whose nicknames were not registered. Roughly 60% of people responded positively, 20% didn't respond and 10% responded negatively. We hate spam; nevertheless (to our disgrace) we overlapped by 5 nicknames and 8 humans.
This unsolicited privving has now stopped, owing to an unspecified number of complaints (and threats). We hope to soon publish all the relevant logs, for people who are interested in a scientific study of unsolicited privs.
Many people ask us "Must my nickname be registered?", "Will I be penalised if I'm not registered?", "What benefits are there to be registered?" and, alas, "How do I register?". The answers to these questions are, from first to last, "no", "no", "it makes it harder for people to maliciously impersonate you", and "just type /msg nickserv help at the prompt and follow the instructions".
(c) Samuel Murray (author) 1999-11-11 (updated 1999-12-01, 1999-12-14, 1999-12-24)
http://www.geocities.com/lacialacia/newbie/index.html
ordinateur@websurfer.co.za