Taking a closer look at Internet chatrooms then and now

I’ve never understood the fascination with Internet chat rooms. Even back in the… I’ve never understood the fascination with Internet chat rooms. Even back in the long-forgotten days of the ’90s, when hanging out in a chat room was trendier than going to Starbucks and “lol” and “jk” became popular phrases, I abstained.

I didn’t have Internet access until I was 16 years old, when my parents finally broke down and got AOL, the Internet service we kept until just a month before my 23rd birthday. I can still remember sitting on Mom’s bed as we set up our accounts and how she gave me the regular warnings: Don’t talk to people you don’t know, don’t give out personal information and don’t go into chat rooms.

Though under a watchful eye, on rare occasions I would venture into one of the dreaded rooms. I might have been a teen-ager, but I was as naive as a junior high school kid. I frequented teen-centric sites like Seventeen.com, dawsonscreek.com and pittsburghpenguins.com, I exchanged emails with friends from work and school and occasionally chatted on instant messenger.

Seven years later, my Internet habits are pretty much the same. Dial-up has evolved into cable Internet and dawsonscreek.com and Seventeen.com have morphed into Buffy the Vampire Slayer sites and post-gazette.com, and I still stay away from chat rooms.

To me, going into a chat room was similar to walking onto the crowded lawn at a country music concert — a bunch of people you don’t know, but who have something random in common, all talking about different things that seem to make no sense to you.

It’s practically the same thing with going into a chat room. You have a common interest, but for the most part, the only people talking are those who actually know each other. And just like on the lawn, there are the slimy guys trying to get with every girl in the place, regardless of their age.

And so we find the major problem with Internet chat rooms. What started as the greatest merging of information and communication has now become yet another way to reach out and touch someone. The problem is there’s no way to tell who it is you’re talking to. Blueeyedchick might actually be a 35-year-old woman rather than the 21-year-old college student she claims to be, and rockrulez just might not be the cute football player he says he is. And that’s where the problem starts to come in.

The Internet offers an anonymity no other mode of communication can. Via your computer, you can be whoever or whatever you want. The problem is, like all other things in this society, it gets abused.

Years back, chat rooms became a playground for pedophiles and other sex offenders to find new prey. While the majority of Internet users have never had an encounter with them, they have to come and ruin the fun for everyone.

A Bloomberg News article from Sunday announced that Yahoo! has shut down several of its chat rooms after strong financial supporters pulled advertising from the sites because they were concerned the rooms were “being used by adults to lure young children.”

Companies such as State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. and Pepsi pulled the ads after they found out their ads were being displayed in chat rooms that covered topics such as pedophilia.

The result? Yahoo! pulled all user-created chat rooms and has now banned users from forming new ones, according to the Bloomsburg report. Visitors to that portion of the site are met by a message that informs them that service is not currently available and is being updated to comply with the site’s terms of service.

Once again, it’s a few people ruining something for everyone else. While I might not get the purpose behind them, I can’t help but wonder how many groups who met regularly are now out of contact with one another.

Rather than completely banning user-created rooms, why doesn’t Yahoo! monitor the rooms? Granted, there is no way the company can tell for certain who you are. But what they can do is track IP addresses, monitor what’s happening in their rooms and take responsibility for what happens on their service.

But then again, who actually is willing to be accountable for what happens on their turf these days?

Despite her spiffy headshot, Daveen is actually a 45-year-old biker who’s addicted to instant messaging. Get to know the real woman behind the column at drk974@pitt.edu.