There were twenty people sitting in the hot-tub when I arrived late on a Saturday night. One man had spent the day surfing waves in South Africa while another had surfed the library at the University of Nebraska. Without leaving their favourite chair at home, people can be transported across cyberspace by modems and phone lines so that they may visit an art exhibit in Moscow, go on a tour of the White House, or chat with a friend in Ireland. In cyberspace, people are falling in love with others that they have never seen in person or touched with their own hands.
People go to the chat room, yet at the same time they are also at home.
With millions of people now using the internet and on-line services, there is an urgent need to answer these questions. In this paper, I use participant observation to take a brief look at who uses on-line chat rooms and what they do there. I follow this up with a short, unstructured interview. Due to the brevity of this paper, I am unable to include more than one case in this study. What I describe here should not be viewed as typical or atypical since generalisations can not be made from this one case.