Chat and Chat Rooms

Chat (online), simultaneous text communication between two or more people via computer. Chat is synchronous—one person types a message on their keyboard, and the people with whom they are chatting see the message appear on their monitors and can respond almost immediately. Other kinds of computer communication are asynchronous. E-mail, for example, may not be delivered or read until minutes or hours after it is sent, and any response need not be immediate.

Chat requires each user to have a computer connected to an electronic network. The network might be a local area network within a business, or it might be the Internet. Users also need a chat system, software that controls the connection between the computers of the people who are chatting. Many chat systems are free.

Chat is most commonly used for social interaction. For example, people might use chat to discuss topics of shared interest or to meet other people with similar interests. Businesses and educational institutions are increasingly using chat as well. Some companies hold large online chat meetings to tell employees about new business developments. Such meetings are particularly useful for companies whose employees are spread out geographically—companies with large sales forces, for example. Small workgroups within a company may use chat to coordinate their work. In education, teachers use chat to help students practice language skills and to provide mentoring to students. History students may chat with elders who lived through the period of history the students are studying. Science students may chat with professional scientists.

How Chat works?

There are many chat systems, including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), America Online (AOL) Chat, and Microsoft Chat. The different systems are very similar, but users can generally only chat with other people who are using the same system.

Each chat system may have thousands of users spread throughout hundreds of chat rooms. Chat rooms are a feature of the system’s software that allows people with similar interests to send messages to one another without receiving messages from all of the other people using the system. Chat rooms vary in topic and in level of conversation. Usually a chat room’s name describes the topic people in it are supposed to discuss.

Most chat systems have both predefined and user-created chat rooms. When people connect to a chat system, they can choose to participate in the rooms they find interesting or useful. Many systems have chat room operators who may remove people from the chat room if they do not obey the chat room's rules.

Chat rooms are usually dedicated to a particular group of people, such as teens, or to discussions limited to a single subject area, such as politics. Some chat rooms cover technical topics (computer programming languages or Web site design, for example), and others focus on aspects of popular culture (the television show Star Trek, for example). Chat rooms dedicated to topics such as computer trouble-shooting can be useful sources of information, because many people with expert knowledge enjoy helping others online.

Some chat systems provide special moderated chat rooms, particularly for chats with celebrities. A chat room may have hundreds of people talking at once. A moderator and a set of rules control who receives messages from whom in order to prevent a flood of messages flowing across people’s screens too fast to read. The moderator controls who may ask questions of the guest of honor. In some of these special chat rooms, participants are organized into virtual “rows,” as if they were in an auditorium. Users may chat freely with others in the same row, but not with people in other rows. Everyone in all rows hears the presentation given by the featured speakers on the “stage.”

Chat has its own jargon. People who chat commonly use abbreviations. BRB, for example, means "be right back." IMHO means "in my humble opinion."