Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 67

KJATT A ALNETINUM I FØROYUM
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children’s disco. On the homepage of a pop-
ular chat channel people have been dis-
cussing the establishment of a new channel
for the youngest chatters. The 16-20 year
olds want to get rid of the 10-12 year olds
“disturbing” them on the intemet.
Communication
The first impression is always important,
also when discussing chat. You measure the
stranger through the content of the text and
sometimes the linguistic level. Conceming
one-to-one chat (private chat) there is a di-
alogue where the chatters start with some
polite standard questions before finding out
if they should aim at this conversation and
continue or just say “bye, it was fun...” and
then move on to the next person. Persons
chatting with the whole channel, i.e. all the
chatters can see and read their text messages,
are often experienced chatters logging on
every night and knowing most people on the
channel. Some of the first information that
chatters ask for are age, sex and location -
the intemational abbreviation of the ques-
tion being ASL. However it may seem quite
aggressive or even desperate to confront
your counterpart with ASL in the very first
text line. Many chatters have nicknames
(nicks) that identify their sex, age and loca-
tion. A girl’s name can be “Female20” or
“Man Havn”. These nicknames are very
simple and clear, but some experienced chat-
ters choose to use more complex and cryp-
tic nicknames appearing totally incompre-
hensible to the outsider. On the Faroese chat
there is e.g. a chatter named SyDrOnX. The
youngest chatters often use, as also men-
tioned by Sørensen and Olesen (2000: 57),
their idols or fancy words e.g. “HotBabe”
or “Shakira”. These nicknames seem at-
tractive to other young chatters, especially
those of the opposite sex. Some chatters
have several nicknames that they use on dif-
ferent occasions. The nickname may even
contain explicit messages to the others on
the chat channel; the chatter may when he
for example takes a break from the computer
to eat dinner but doesn’t want to log out
change from the name “Klax Girl” to “Klax
Girl Away”, thereby telling everybody that
he or she is not reachable at the moment.
If you are not starting the communica-
tion with the ASL question then you write
e.g. “hello, how are you?” or “hello, where
in the Faroe Islands are you?” If you get an
answer to your question, then the dialogue
continues perhaps until the chatters know
each other concerning age, sex and location
as well as other facts. Chat sequences may
be very short: two persons meet (on chat
channels), exchange some personal infor-
mation and end the dialogue. Chatters know-
ing each other well are also often having
very short conversations and jump from one
to the next the whole evening. As regards
the youngest chatters, chatting is, for most
of them, simply a pastime like playing
PlayStation or watching DVD.
Categories
Chatters are as different as other people,
even if they have common interests relating
to the chat culture. They have basic techni-
cal knowledge of how to get access to the
chat channels, which programmes to down-
load and install on your computer (if you are
chatting at home), and a social knowledge