Stay in line online

EVEN alternative online chatters know they must keep themselves nice.

AFTER analysing 6000 hours of internet chat from an alternative sexuality channel, Danielle Lawson understands that in cyberspace, as in life, there are rules. But interviews with 100 users of online dating services demonstrated to Matthew Bambling that in those forums there are not yet enough rules, tacit or explicit.

The researchers were based at the Queensland University of Technology when they completed their studies, although Lawson is now a postdoctoral fellow in communications at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US.

She was intrigued to find that far from being a free-for-all, chat-room interaction could be highly structured and to flout the laws governing them was to risk becoming an outcast.

"People who are living outside the norms of sexual interaction orient towards rules and enforce rules in this online virtual world," Lawson says.

For Bambling, a psychologist who gained his doctorate in the treatment of depression, the pilot project in a new field has led to the depressing conclusion that prolonged online flirtations that observe few conventions and contain the potential for raising expectations sky-high sometimes set the scene for disappointment when a meeting finally occurs.

If players don't learn to manage their interactions better the next time, they are setting themselves up for disillusionment, he says.

But his first discovery has been on how attitudes to online dating differ between age groups. "Young people use it in addition to their normal social networks; the 30-pluses are hooked up in their careers, there are fewer single people to meet and the net gives them more chances of meeting someone; and those in their 40s feel it is a good way of meeting people but feel a bit more of a stigma," Bambling says.

Then there is the question of managing the emails that you attract.

One woman attracted 300 in one day and, after considerable whittling down, began an online relationship that lasted several months. "She fell in love with a guy and after months of intense interaction they arranged to meet." They didn't hit it off and she felt those months had been wasted.

Hence Bambling's cardinal rule of online dating: several exchanges, then meet, for coffee, during the day.

"If they like each other, then they can do the impressive dinner on the second date," he says. And sometimes it results in friendship, not romance. "It's like going to a nightclub: people give you lots of chat," Bambling says. "Some guys use a technique called 'netting': sending an engaging email to half a dozen women and see who nibbles."

At the other end of the scale are Lawson's interest group, who never expect to meet, although they don't expect to find true love, either.

Lawson, an online chatter for the past 15 years, has analysed conversation logs from a server-based chat room on a international forum known as Internet Relay Chat and is fascinated by the strict nature of the small world she has joined.

Those who go beyond the pale are "chased out of the chat room with insults and sarcasm". The chat room's main laws include an (unenforceable) age restriction to 18 years and older and a ban on posting URL links. The links are sometimes deposited by harassers, so that clicking on one of them can lead to spam "screaming" (via exclusive use of capital letters) that fills the screen.

There is also, in common with a lot of websites, a stern disapproval of lurking, which is when people arrive in the room but refuse to interact -- this is regarded as very rude -- and a ban on trolling, which is the posting of deliberatively argumentative comments or seeking sex.

Offenders run the risk of being booted off the site by the chat room operator, a powerful individual who can arrange for the offender's nickname or their server to be banned.

The offenders' less powerful peers get stuck in with insults and sarcasm.

The chat room is for people who are gay or lesbian, transexual or transgender, or cross-dressers, but rather than being a place where they necessarily seek sexual contact, it is regarded as a place where they can talk about all manner of things, with people who have the same challenges and experience as as they do.

And a caring community can also grow up. Lawson cites September 11, 2001, when all the group talked about was the attack on the World Trade Centre. There was no appetite for triviality in the room that day.

But that was far from the norm. Topics usually range from what they had for breakfast, to their children's science project. Lawson's verdict on the general level of conversation in the chat room? Often mundane.