This past week has taken me to some new corners of the internet I’d never seen. Communicating on the Web introduced me to Internet Relay Chat. I have no experience with IM or other direct messaging applications, so this was my introduction.
Technical issue: It took me a while to get oriented to Chatzilla. I spent a long time trying to figure out what channels were available. Finally, I discovered I could use “join channel” from the file menu. That was faster (way faster!) than using the /join command in the text entry field. It gave me channel names and numbers of users for the different channels that were open. I joined several channels at once. It was like using “Seek” on the radio dial. I could flip between different channels real fast. The conversation moved real SLOW, so I had a lot of time to channel surf.
Weirdness: The “join channel” screen provided the channel name, number of users, and also a tag line describing what the channel was mostly about. Some of these labels were altogether vulgar, or hateful, or just plain strange. Something for everyone, apparently. One of the channels I joined on Tuesday night was #wikipedia. I thought that maybe I’d learn something more about this interesting internet resource. Instead I learned that college kids in dorm rooms use IRC to tell each other about how stoned they are on various chemicals. After a fairly involved discussion about the limitations of sobriety, they complained about someone involved in the wikipedia editing process who, they believed, was too focused on his own power and authority. A tedious discussion.
That being said, I’m glad that I know about IRC now. It may come in handy some day. I liked the #php and the #wordpress channels. They stayed pretty focused. At this point, though, I see this as more of a curiosity than as a tool for me. I can see great potential for constructive work with IRC, but I also recognize that what can be accomplished with any tool depends on the choices made by its users.
