Chat rooms and listening

I'm new to chat rooms and forums, but I have the sense that with so many groups and interests available out there, when you're in a chat room, there's a specific reason why "you", collectively, have assembled. There's a topic to discuss, or an interest in common. Perhaps there are people with lots of time on their hands and nowhere else to go, so they wander aimlessly in and out of chat rooms looking for conversation about whatever. But I don't think that's most people.

You're there to meet other people who share a part of who you are. No two people are exactly the same, but there are many ways that your interests can cross with my interests in a common connection at a certain moment in time in a certain place. So we chat and see what we can learn, or share, or be entertained by, for that passage of time together. Or maybe, we just get to know each other better because we learned that we have something in common and can have fun with it.

Last night, I was in a chat room where one person got offended by others' religious comments. He felt that he wasn't being listened to about his concerns, and that perhaps some were "preaching" and not dealing with the common issue at hand. He couldn't understand the worldview that several people had in common that God is in control of their lives, and allows bad things to happen sometimes, to refine their character or help them to become useful to others with a similar problem because they've "been there".

He couldn't even entertain the idea that God could allow difficult circumstances. So he "stormed out" of the room, and those left behind felt really bad that he'd quit listening as well. They had made efforts to apologize and clear the air, but he'd already closed his mind and heart to everyone there. He was in that chat room for one common interest, but felt left out when several others discovered they had another common interest that he didn't share or want to entertain. At least that was how I saw it. I'm sure his story is much more complicated than that, but it helped me to see a few things about chatting.

When there are too many active participants, the chatter goes fast and it's hard to keep up with reading what's whipping by and still add relevant comments. Emotions flare and then things get said and responded to at different paces, so misunderstandings happen because one person types faster or someone else's post arrives quicker. And then it's hard to retract the misunderstanding because you're not face to face to resolve it with body language or a smile.

Also, people should try to more or less stick to the issue at hand. Personal experiences can and should be shared if they're relevant, but more personal sharing is better done one-to-one in an email context or IM mode. If the topic is of a technical nature, and someone is sharing a deep emotional issue, everyone gets derailed with either wanting to help the hurting person, or feeling that someone is commandeering the discussion away from the topic they have come to discuss.

There is certainly a variety of people that arrive in a chat room, and to have a meaningful discussion you need various people's input. But that can become an issue as well, because you want to keep people in, so you have to be touching them all in some way, or they get bored and leave, and the discussion is over. But when the variety is either too wide a demographic, or too wide of discussion topics, someone will realize that it is not worth their time.

So, I'll continue to watch and learn how chat rooms work. And if I see that guy again, I'll try to build a bridge of understanding with him and hope he'll come back next time, and be ready to give and take as the discussion unfolds. Because we're all the better when we take time to really listen. Am I listening to myself??