Interesting IRC

Over the decades, social networking on the internet has undergone very extreme and rapid changes. One of the earlier forms of social network would be none other than the traditional chat rooms – the equivalent “Facebook” or “Twitter” our older friends or cousins used to subscribe to when they were teenagers. One of the classic examples of these chat rooms would be the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It was extremely popular. Was.

Just like our MSN messenger and Facebook chat now, the IRC was designed to allow real-time, synchronous chats. Users have the option to either engage in group communications, aka channels, or one to one communications via private message.

I personally have had little experience with this classic form of social network, but I did hear a few funny stories from friends and family members who used to be loyal subscribers! Unlike Facebook or even Friendster, the traditional IRC did not have the application for users to put up their photos. Hence, you really do not know how exactly every person in the chat rooms look like. This could be the reason why it was really common for people, especially teenagers, to ask one another in the chat rooms to describe his or her appearance.

Now, this is the amusing part. From what I have heard, it seemed like there were basically only a few criteria for a guy to be deemed as “good-looking” by many Singaporean teenage girls then. So my friend was talking to this girl on IRC a couple of years back, and she asked him if he is good-looking. As usual, he humbly, and partially jokingly said that he looks really ugly. The conversation then continued as shown below (as accurate as what my friend can remember after these years):

Girl: Hmm…ur hairstyle lyk wad one? (Translation: What is your hairstyle?)

Friend: Center parting loh

Girl: Oic…do euux wear specs? (Translation: Oh I see, do you wear spectacles?)

Friend: No leh why?

Girl: Eh lyk dat shld be nort bad wad… whr got ugly? Lolx (;
(Translation: In that case, you shouldn’t look too bad right?)

Friend: HAHA

Me: HAHAHAHAHA

So what were the 2 criteria to be deemed as handsome on IRC?
1) Centre parting hairstyle
2) Does not wear spectacles













The funny thing is that my friend has actually encountered such judgments quite a few times from different people. This really let us see how naïve some users of IRC were at that time. This could very well be one of the reasons why there were cases of teenage girls being cheated into meeting some 40 years old man from the chat rooms. But again, I must also make it clear that the above example is not in any way intended to generalize or insult users of IRC. It is nothing more than a funny story.

Upon writing all these, it suddenly came to me that the story is so amusing only because of the underrated fact that technology has improved so drastically over the years. Unlike in the past, we can now easily see a photo of someone else, and we are so used to it. I realized that I almost could not imagine myself asking someone to describe his/her looks, only because there is no such need now. But again, at that time, how else could one get an idea of the physical appearance of the other party in the chat room other than asking for a verbal description? The girl in the above story could then be very well compared to those today who believe that the “handsome” guy on Facebook is putting up his real photo.

CMC - with great powers comes greater responsibilities.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) has indeed invaded many different realms of the lives of mankind. Many facets of human activities involve CMC and it has proven itself to be extremely influential and has definitely become an essential to aid us in different ways. One powerful form of CMC that plays a big part in almost every individual’s life today is social networking sites like facebook and twitter. According to a separate report from Compete.com, Facebook has also surpassed Yahoo, as the number two most popular site (behind Google) in the U.S., with nearly 134 million unique visitors in January 2010. In fact, the Compete.com data showed that 11.6% of all time spent online in January was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google). Another recent report from the leading technology blog Tech Crunch highlighted the expanding role social sites such as Facebook are playing in sharing widgets and applications. Incorporating data from Gigya, a company that powers widgets on more than 5,000 sites, Tech Crunch found that the distribution of shared items broke down as follows:
Facebook (44%) Twitter (29%) Yahoo (18%) MySpace (9%)

Some people, especially those from the older generation might think that these sites like facebook are merely for basic networking purposes or maybe for people to meet some new friends. Well, I do not blame them for that as it is really forgivable for them to not be very familiar with this form of CMC. But I do have to correct them in thinking that way. In fact, facebook even played a part in influencing the outcome of the 2008 presidential election in the United States of America! It was in January 2007 when Farouk Olu Aregbe, a student government coordinator at the University of Missouri, launched a Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack." A year later, the group had signed up half a million "friends" (in Facebook lingo) as Obama supporters.

However, as these social networking sites invade our lives in positive ways, they absolutely do have the potential to create atrociously undesirable effects as well. One of such is the rise of cyber-bullying cases. This is also one type of bullying that many parents of victims (students) do not have much knowledge of, thus underestimating the depressing effects it can cause to the victims.

To read more on this recent article, go to:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6275UG20100309



















Cyber-bullying basically consists of 8 types, namely, exclusion, outing, harassment, cyber-stalking, masquerading, flaming, pseudonym and anonymity. All of these can truly result in emotional as well as psychosocial effects on the lives of the victims. And according to psychologist Eric Erikson, whatever challenges or difficulty an individual experiences in each stage of his life would carry over as an extra difficulty in later life if it is not being solved satisfactorily. This may result in those victims not be able to present him/herself as confidently as others in certain situations he/she faces in the future. And in the worst cases, some of those victims had even committed suicide due to the inability to handle the psychological effects from the bullying cases. Some of these cases were even being discussed in the recent Oprah Winfrey show. As you can see, it may truly cause extremely tragic results if nobody actually takes the effort to look into these situations and continue having the complacent thinking that these forms of bullying through CMC can never be as deadly as physical bullying.

The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Yet, society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused.