Inhabiting Real-Time
This research, based on fieldwork conducted in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, shows some of the modalities of the practices adopted by people who chat online. An analysis of the content of online communication demonstrates how the practice makes it possible to experience the chat room as a “place” in which fundamentally one communicates for the sake of being with others. The exchanges, which frequently seem devoid of content, are used by chatters to occupy the online environment, to give it a more concrete substance, and to pass time with others, like one can do in places like pubs and cafés, where what is said can be less important than the fact of being together. These routines of online communication are interpreted in relation to offline settings and to times of individual daily life in which the practice of forming a virtual place and the sharing of real time becomes understandable as a way of building a community.