repost from May 27, 2001
Chat… hahah!
I just spent a night hanging out in MSN chat. Not that I really was that lonely, or that bored, but just that I was sort of curious as to what sort of people join MSN chat.
It’s certainly easy enough to sign up. I filled out a few feilds, clicked ‘yes’, and away I went. The interface was nicely intuitive, and I had a wide variety of channels to choose from, all aparently well filled. No shortage of people.
What there was a major shortage of is conversation. I went from room to room, and even tried whispering to a variety of people, but for the most part, the only conversation I could get was ‘Hi’, ‘How are you’, ‘A/S/L’, and the occasional ‘want to have cyber sex?’ or the equivelant – usually
from males not smart enough to check my profile for gender.
Is this really the best we can do? The most interesting conversation I had all night was with someone who was quoting a infomercial to me. Not only could I not get anyone to talk about anything intelligent – I couldn’t even get them to talk about the weather. Apparently, anything more
complicated than ‘hi’ or ‘wanna cyberfuck’ is beyond these people. This really scares me. These are (one presumes) the smarter eggs.
Theseare people who figured out how to get their modem working, their ISP hooked up, got on the net, and decided they wanted to talk. Okay, so they aren’t mega-geeks or they’d know better than to use microsoft’s chat service – but… It’s just disturbing. I mean, have we really fallen this far? Has
television so eclipsed our abilities to think that we can’t even manage to hold a decent conversation? Maybe a little back-and-forth?
And then, of course, at the end of my fine netting experience came the ultimate. Two people got in a flamewar, and I swear it was like watching 3 year olds:
xxx: Fuck you
yyyy: Fuck you too
xxx: like I give a shit
yyy: you don’t, do you. What if I come make you?
OVER THE INTERNET? HELLOOOOOOO! Is there anybody IN there? You’re not even smart enough to figure out what a IP address IS, much less how to map one to a geographic location. About the only chance you have of getting the other guy’s address is if he’s dumb enough to give it to you – which if
what I saw tonight was any sample, MIGHT HAPPEN!
This is TERRIFYING! No wonder microsoft gets away with writing such horrid software – the users probebly just think it’s their fault when the computers crash anyway. Is this my imagination? Or has thinking in general gone out of vouge in favor of simply accepting the grass that’s handed to you like a good little cow?
At one point I commented that I didn’t like Las Vegas, except for DefCon – and someone asked me why not.. I gave four reasons, and she agreed with every one of them. Then I commented that I was glad it suited her even though it wasn’t for me – and she hemmed and hawed and it came out that
she basically didn’t like it much either, but she felt the need to defend it because it was ‘her city’. Is this why my parents keep telling me what a great place America is? I’m not sure…
Whatever happened to trying to _change_ the things you don’t like? Okay, so we’re never going to make Lost Wages any less hot.. in fact, I think the best solution is to just abandon the city – geothermal cooling won’t even work there because the _ground’s_ too hot – but we could certainly
figure out some way to make it so people didn’t always look so miserable coming in. Not sure how, but surely it could be done… I don’t know. Just ranting.