Please, take pity on me and shoot me now. I ve just discovered the IRC. Like going from soft drugs to the hard stuff, I ve just had my first taste of the most addictive time-consuming pastime that could possibly have been invented to tempt me to hell and eternal damnation.
And what, you are wondering, is the IRC? It s the live part of the Internet: Internet Relay Chat. It s the way of communicating in real time with people all over the world, in special interest groups. It s done via a keyboard, and the messages take just a couple of seconds to travel to and from whomsoever you choose.
Everyone has a nickname, or nick, similar to a CB radio handle ; and there can only be one of each nick in use at any one time. You can chat so that everyone else can read, or take the conversation away from public view. You can swap pictures, so you can look at a photo of them as you re tapping the night away. It s possible to play sounds to each other; there s even the possibility, with a little camera perched on top of your monitor and the correct software, that you can see live pictures of your correspondent.
But what I found most interesting was discovering that there is a palpable sense of community there, more than I ve encountered before on the net (and certainly more than I ve stumbled across in Non-Virtual London). So far, my only experience of Internet group dynamics has been with mailing lists. These are discussion groups, which proceed at a much slower pace, sometimes with deliveries from the postman occurring only once a day.
hastily-written rebuke
I ve noticed a curious polarisation can take place. It can sometimes be very dry, detached, and cold on these forays. No-one s making eye contact, no-one knows what each other looks like. But if, or more accurately, when the discussion gets heated, and tempers get frayed, the emotional impact of a hastily-written rebuke seems to increase exponentially with the passage of time between the posting and the receipt. Such attacks are like cannonballs; the longer they take to land, the more it feels that they were shot with enormous force and deliberation from a premeditated position far away. Time is a great healer, except when an apology is delayed.
But the IRC is different. There is a person in charge of each group, or channel , but by default that role is taken by the first person to bring the channel into existence that day. When and if the more regular channel operators arrive, they take over, by group consensus, and ensure that civilised rules of behaviour are adhered to. They have the power to ban someone from the group, if they misbehave by advertising or getting abusive. As soon as the last person leaves the group
it ceases to exist, until someone else, perhaps on some other part of the globe, wishes to create it again.
It is a rolling, collective responsibility for keeping order, of a kind which I have not encountered before, and the principle of which I find exciting. Naturally, it s not perfect, and it can get extremely chaotic when it gets crowded, but it all seems to have an appealing organic logic.
Regular groups often have their own websites, which have pages listing the regular members and their websites. By visiting these original electronic magazines, you can get an incredibly powerful impression of their creators personalities. These web pages, in many cases costing next to nothing, are not commercial or academic. They are sometimes autobiographical, but always unique; sometimes lyrical, or bawdy, or religious, or political. A few are hilarious, and some are very moving. Here and there you stumble upon works of art, pushing out the boundaries of graphic and video design. Some are purely pornographic. Some are exploring, for example, in a highly original manner, the subjects of sadomasochism and gender identity. Whereas others simply show photos of their housemates, the dog and the back garden under snow, and helpfully list their favourite films.
shag or a pint
I ve surfed the Web before, mostly for business, sometimes for juicy pictures. But the difference the IRC makes is that all the sites you visit are by people with whom you can expect to engage in conversation within the foreseeable future. You can question them about their politics or the name of their dog or what their sexual fantasies are. And you can be reasonably sure that you would have an enjoyable conversation, because you ve seen and read how they wish to present themselves to the world, through their website.
If they live in the same city as you, there s the possibility you could meet for a shag or a pint. But because it s the IRC, and you know that you re going to bump into them again, I would imagine that people would treat each other with a little more consideration than they would in a club or on the phonelines.
Although everyone uses a nickname in these groups, one s identity is not hard to conceal from those who know how to look.
In some ways, it is amazing that it s taken me so long to join this world. Perhaps, knowing what an addictive personality I have, I knew that this way may lie ruin. I ve been on the net for nearly three years now, with websites and mailing lists to my name; but in the same way as I never play computer games, I had dismissed IRC as a toy, something frivolous. And, dear reader, you know by now that I m anything but frivolous.
But something powerful is afoot with this medium. And my enthusiasm is coloured by the fact that last weekend, another typical bloody weekend in London, I went out and tried to meet a few new people. One guy couldn t hide his boredom because I wasn t going to jump into bed with him; another told me how his boyfriend was waiting at home and he was all wired because he had just had sex with someone else that afternoon, and the third, someone who had been eyeing me up for ages, uttered the heart-stopping words Sorry, not interested , when I worked up the courage to say hello. He then proceeded to tell me that he was straight, and was only out for a quick shag.
irrational
creatures
In this changing world, I am excited by the prospect of getting to know some new people who share my interests. Be they sexual, political or artistic, it seems that I have stumbled upon a method of gradually building up some new friendships, and who knows, the possibility of something more.
I read recently that a researcher in human relationships has decided that, far from being irrational creatures when it comes to matters of the heart, we actually base our choice of partners on simple, although unconscious, mathematics. If you have had 12 emotional encounters/relationships with people in your life, then the next person who comes along, who is in any way a cut above those 12, will be the one you choose to spend the rest of your life with. So I did myself some counting, with a friend, and to our surprise, we realised that we had both reached the Magic Dozen. These are interesting times. n

Bootboy is on the Web at http://www.demon.co.uk/astrolog/bootboy/