After reading over this assignment I decided that the easiest way to observe an online target was by entering a chat room. Since I have never used chat rooms before, I did a search on chat rooms and decided on a site called chatfamily.com. Here there were several different types of chat rooms to choose from, including adult chat, teen chat, youth chat and gays and lesbians chat. I thought it might be interesting to enter a youth chat room, ages 13 to 17, and see if I could tell if the chatters were actually children.
In the chat room people were talking in real time, therefore it was a synchronous space. I entered the chat room feeling very skeptical and suspicious of who I would chat with inside. I had a preformed notion that I would run into pedophiles looking to chat with kids or something unusual along those lines. Scrolling through the conversation I looked for any obvious clues of an adult being present in the chat. I saw “does anyone like puppies” and decided that was an obvious clue. I answered back that I did indeed like puppies and was invited by the chatter into a private chat.
The person I chatted with said that he was 14 years old and lived in New York State. He was very open about his hobbies and school but never mentioned what he looked like, nor did I ask. We talked about simple things like movies and TV and noting sexual was ever brought up. This made me believe that he was in fact a fourteen year old and not some old creepy man trying to harass children.
The target was very open and agreeable throughout the chat. He answered the questions I asked him without any hesitation and for the most part his answers seemed to be honest. He seemed extravert because he was eager to go into a private chat with me and have a real conversation. I found myself using the hyper-personal theory when forming my impressions of the target. Through the short conversation we had, his straightforward questions and answers made me believe that he was really just in the chat room to talk, with no alternate motives. Maybe if I had talked for longer, or talked to him again, I would discover that he was indeed not being honest, but as of now I could not conclude anything of the sort.
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I too have never used chat rooms before and went into this assignment thinking that the easiest place to meet someone would be through a chat room. I shared your view in being skeptical and suspicious during the chat experience. But in reading about your experience, I kept thinking that a more interesting issue is how and why you assumed that there were going to be pedophiles in the chat room. Nonetheless, I found myself thinking and sharing a similar feeling about the issue of the pedophile. I’m not sure of my basis for my assumption, but I know that I shared similar feelings.
An interesting trend that I have noticed is that people have been very open when talking online. At the same time, I still find the fact that the topic of topic of “what’s your name?” didn’t come up. While your second experience was with an extrovert type of person, I sense that you formulated certain initial impressions and were struggling with trying to keep an open mind about the individual and her personality. I had a similar type of exchange.
I wonder if we talked to the same people we met from this assignment a few more times if we would really find out some true information about them, in your case, if the “young” (14 year old) really is a pedophile. I know you think he was telling the truth now, but would that hold true if, after a couple more conversations with him, would some of his stories change or would you think differently.
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