Our first assignment in Live Web was to tell a story via a text based synchronous medium online. I was assigned to do it on IRC, which I had never used before. I told my story about an interesting experience I had in San Francisco over the summer.

I found a chat room with a name that looked innocent enough.  But then I noticed the not-so-innocent screen names of those in the room.

Despite all the people in the chat room.  Not much was going on, so I thought I would just start telling my story and see what would happen.  I am “odietamo”:

I didn’t get a response for 15 minutes, and when I did, it was a one-word racial slur.  I signed off soon after that.  Not the most exciting introduction to the world of IRC.  The chat room name seemed general enough, but I couldn’t really tell what the purpose of it was.  I don’t think my story was particularly suited to the medium.  I did not know anybody in the “audience,” and even in real life, it is the kind of story that I wouldn’t normally tell to strangers without a context.  In real life, I would modify how I told the story (if I were to tell it at all) based on the reactions of the people I was telling it to.  In this case, I got no meaningful feedback, so I was basically just broadcasting into the ether.