Text-based chat

Online chat is a way of communicating by sending text messages to people in the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms such as Yahoo! use both text and voice simultaneously. The oldest form of true chat rooms are the text-based variety.

Chat room activities

The primary use of a chat room is to share information via text with a group of other users. New technology has enabled the use of file sharing and webcams to be included in some programs and almost all Internet chat or messaging services allow users to display or send to each other photos of themselves. With a prolific rise in the activity of 'Sexting', where people send digitised nude or otherwise sexually explicit photos of themselves electronically to be viewed by others, it is becoming increasingly common for chat room users to exchange nude or sexual photos.

Rules of behavior

Chat rooms usually have stringent rules that they require users to follow in order to maintain integrity and safety for their users. Particularly in rooms for children, rules usually do not allow users to use offensive language, or to promote hate mail, violence and other negative issues. Also chat rooms often do not allow advertising in their rooms or flooding, which is continually filling the screen with repetitive text. Typing with caps lock on is usually considered shouting and is discouraged.

Language issues

Even today, relatively little is known about the discourse produced in on-line communication contexts. While there is a growing body of literature on sociolinguistic variation in French chat for example, other forms of computer mediated communication (e.g. discussion fora, weblogs, etc.) have received less attention[