by Cody Woodard:
I've been pondering how people visualize IRC in their heads. This is a pretty trivial exercise since IRC is purely text-based, but that's what makes it so interesting.
My View on IRC
I have no idea why, but I sometimes wonder how the text-based adventures we call IM and IRC would look in reality. Most people don't seem to think about this at all, but is my interpretation. I picture the room itself as a totally blank, black space, which fades off into the Void. It looks kinda like the loading program in the Matrix, but instead of total whiteness, there are painted black walls and floor where everything is fully lit, fading off (sharply) into a space of total darkness. There is no ceiling. I don't have to worry about this much, as rain in invariably uncommon in the Internet. Whenever people enter or exit the room, they walk out of this area of darkness onto the "stage". I don't think the darkness means anything, other than it's a really easy way to keep things outta sight and outta mind. You can't use a door that leads from the room to the Internet, as objects (such as doors) can only exist when kept in the mind of the participates of the room itself. For example, if someone mentions setting a cup on a table, then both the cup and the table manifest themselves pretty quickly. Eventually, as the text describing the cup and table fades further and further into the back scroll, so do the items themselves, fading from existence to non-being.
Sitting on the Intangible Couch
One of my first adventures into the realm of Internet chattery led me to be in a room with two permanent props: a couch and a bar. I somewhat believe these two props to be the product of people with similar yet stronger views on IRC, as it's really hard to talk to everyone while constantly standing up and being without a martini in your hand. The interesting thing about the couch and the bar were their constant existence, solely because everyone kept mentioning them. If someone wanted to sit down, they'd sit on the couch. (If the couch was full, it would grow a new seat to accommodate.) If someone were scared, they'd hide behind the couch. This all somewhat bothered me one day, so I decided to blow up the couch. So there it was. The most popular prop I've ever seen, charred and on fire. People were angry at me for destroying the communal couch. Someone then walked in from the Internet and sat on the couch, unaware of the couch's demise. Business as usual. So, over time, the couch healed itself as the memory of the destruction left everyone's collective consciousness. Remarkable.
Exploding Other Things
On IRC, I am somewhat known for exploding. It's somewhat like what comedians do when one of their jokes don't go over. They hit the mic, snap their fingers (to get the audiences attention), and do any kind of weird random thing to recover from the non-laughter. Myself? I explode. Recently, people have been playing with my earthly remains. When I explode, I somewhat imagine it to be out of a Monty Python sketch. Big poof of smoke, and I don't exist anymore. However, whenever people start playing with little charred pieces of me, it seems a little odd. They originally didn't exist. Now, they do. I eventually fade back into existence, but it still troubles me. I was originally simply gone. But with people playing with my remains, that made me dead. At least in an ethereal sense. Every time someone mentions d8uv-ash, I become a corpse due to someone else's imagination. That corpse eventually will fade into non-existence due to it slowly leaving the collective consciousness, but it all still seems somewhat off.
Viewing Other Things while Sitting on a Couch
I know these things are purely the work of an active imagination. There is no couch, whether it exists in the consciousness of the participants or not. And no one can actually make a corpse of me without actually killing me. But if this visualization of a chat room makes you think I'm crazy, imagine a book. Inside the book are words, and often the writer will utilize those words to attempt to paint a mental picture of a scene. Most of you know this as imagery. An author tell you that a character in their book picks up a red book, and you'll believe them. The only real difference between that and this is that this book is intentional in its imagery. This exercise is purely accidental.
[ hastily and crappily written by Cody Woodard ]
@@ Edit more and add ISWAM link! Good stuff, d8uv. --sbp