Tom Erickson, a designer and researcher at IBM who specializes in virtual communities. "In a chat room populated by teenagers who are behaving 'rudely' or 'loudly,' a lot of stuff is going on: negotiating status, experimenting with personal style, claiming membership in an 'in' group. This might seem vacuous to adult listeners, but it is no less free of content than what an eavesdropper might hear in a conversation between me and my wife at dinner."
A lot of people don't see it that way. They want to connect chat room abuse with road rage and other social ills. But it's far more likely that social anger works its way onto - rather than out from - the Net. After all, road rage probably started with the Model T. The difference now is that people can chat online about the SUV that nearly ran them off the road.
What's important is that people are communicating. And they're using the written word. The age-old art of putting words together once was thought to be dying. Now, suddenly, writing is enjoying a renaissance on the Net.
Of course, this rebound in so-called literacy is in its early stages. No new Hemingways yet. At last year's Iowa Summer Writing Festival, a renowned workshop at the University of Iowa (dossier), an engineer with no previous writing experience told me in earnest, "I participate in an AOL chat room for writers, and since I was the best writer in my chat room, I thought I'd come here."
OK, so a chat room will never teach anyone how to pen a novel. But it might provide sympathetic support for the guy who's always longed to write one - and he might learn some colorful new vernacular while he's there.
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Lynn Voedisch is an entertainment and technology writer who lives in Chicago.
