A Chat about Chat, on a Blog

Now it’s October, and I’ve gone mad. "I never thought I'd be on a blog, it's a big electronicky road." Therefore, I divide this blog post in twain.

The Shorts:
I liked our chat session when we were able to pursue individual threads of discussion while simultaneously watching other conversations. Interface issues aside, I disliked it when we tried to impose sterner order (though I understand the impetus). Such order seems to run counter to the conversational advantages that chat allows for.

The Longs:
I’d like to think of chat like how I think of funk music. There’s “the one”—the singular groove that holds all of the variation together. You can’t make the “the one” too tight, else there’s not much room for improvisation. But if you make “the one” too loose and ill-defined, the rhythm falls apart. Easier said than done—I’ve been in plenty of totally bombed jam sessions (and in bombed chat sessions). Though sometimes when one jams (uh oh—this metaphor is on a runaway train), an instrument change is in order. Those changes—which in online synchronus chat we could maybe assign to threads—can help facilitate group strengths. Too many guitar players? I’ll switch to drums. Though this way we’re not necessarily all talking about the same thing, we can still be in conversation with one another. The threads will start to weave in more logical (if at first subconscious) ways. But doesn’t that mean we’re just participating in isolated corners? No, not really. We can still see the chat feed. Having to only reply to a few people at a time makes it easier to look and see what’s going on in other conversations, not harder. The advantages to online synchronus chat are speed and volume—while not necessarily effective in their own right, a quite a lot can be said in very little space. When one angle of a conversation logically concludes (I use “logically” loosely), move on to another, and engage there in focused ways. Really, these are organized patterns of chaos.

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching a creative writing class for Cougar Quest—A summer program where students enroll in college-like courses and stay in the residence halls—and we employ the use of chat technology called a MUSH (which stands for multi-user simulated hallucination…yeah, it was developed during the ‘70s). When teaching this course and using the MUSH (an online chat environment set in a text-world replete with objects and non-player characters), I admit to feeling similarly frustrated. Though our technology was more reliable (amazing that 30-year old chat tech is better than ANGEL with more functions, but I digress), middle and high school students are more difficult to herd than cats. It’s impossible even with two instructors actually, especially when they’re armed with chat technology. Eventually, my co-instructor (Jim Roach, a former art and religious studies major here at WSU) and I figured that we couldn’t *make* our students stay on task. At the time, we were working on adding dialogue to one of many events in J.R.R. Tolkien’s *The Simarillion*. The only way for us to get students to stay on task was to add our own compelling text, hoping that students would respond. Normally these came in the form of environmental variables, though we did write for our own characters. In general, many students would respond to our writing, but others (who were very often working on decent storylines of their own) would ignore us until they were finished. Some ignored us altogether. When we posted these “world events”, it wasn’t to halt action and entirely shift gears, but rather to provide more creative fodder. In later years, Jim and I would start off by separating students into smaller chat communities, eventually introducing them to the larger group for the grand finale. Even still, students who tried to read absolutely everything became overwhelmed. I told them frequently not to sweat it, to just continue on as best as they could. After all, the conversation was being logged, and they could all go back and revise plot elements and other story details as they wished. Several students have sent me their revisions over the years, which invariably look quite different from the original texts.

I won’t go so far as to say that our method “worked.” We’d really have to ask ourselves, “to what end?” first. Though I do hold a short lecture on the context of Tolkien’s work and spout some VERY basic tenants of creative writing, for the rest we ride by the seat of our pants. And it’s pretty normal for some days to bomb terribly; at least it seems that way. Effectively participating in an online chat environment (as with any other) takes regular practice. I’d say that I’m a pretty experienced with such communication technologies, and I felt pretty out of countenance this morning at first, even after I resolved my tech-troubles. I was only really able to engage after I latched onto a point and then tried to ride out the conversation. I’m not sure if we can or should see these types of rapid fire discussions as completely linear. As I said before online, we have to use the right tools for the right jobs. Neither synchronus chat nor asynchronus discussion should be seen as a replacement for face-to-face interaction, but they can be advantageous and useful in their own rights.