I sat down and considered which way I wanted to go with this topic. I’ve been frequenting chatrooms off and on for years and they can be a very mixed bag. Met a few decent friends who I still keep in contact with via them but a lot of the time you meet temporary acquaintances and even more often than that you meet people not worth mentioning.
You can see this even on online games like the well known MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) where the internal chat system tends to display all the worse aspects of the online community. I can’t count the amount of times I have been told to go kill myself or insulted in a thousand varied and often offensive ways.
A lot of people don’t see the point of chatrooms of talking to strangers from strange lands or whatever. The appeal of chatrooms can be the anonymity of it all which in certain cases will allow the shy to come out of their shell a bit and talk to people who they may not have had the courage to talk to face to face, the flipside of course being that without the face to face there is no end of the hateful that some people might be tempted to say. It is a reflection of society which may well have been influenced by the growth of faceless communication chat rooms, texting and that sort of thing.
I don’t think we can blame the current state of society on chat rooms though they and the way people conduct themselves in them are merely symptoms.
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