The many stages of chat
As we get older in life our likes and dislikes take shape and settle into what we feel comfortable with. Likewise chat rooms are not a one-size-fits-all solution to those different preferences. Take for instance chat rooms for the younger teen set, where the conversations revolves around skateboards, console games, comics, teen heart-throbs, rap music and "experimentation" with drugs and sex; where names like biker-chick, anime-boi, sick-dude or such are rather commonplace. Not only is the language impossible to understand, it makes you wonder where [we] parents are leaving this lot unsupervised to their own devices.
Kids get older and migrate into the 18s-and-older rooms - mostly frequented by people claiming to be 18 to 25 ... but who knows! The talk tends to get raunchier and louder, or punctuated by the overuse of SMS-like abbreviations. For the most part, the men who visit those places are only interested in one thing ... and they become homophobically suspicious if another bloke tries to talk to them. It's like watching a bunch of stags fighting over a single doe in there sometimes ... the amount of testosterone is almost suffocating. As for the "girls" ... *shudder* ... I've met check-out operators who have more class, more manners and more sophistication than some of those young "ladies" I've seen.
The 25-35 age-bracket could be described as the "desperate and dateless" set. For many of those people the only "decent" photo they had was taken when they were in their last year at high-school, or some blurred image, shot through a web-cam, that makes them look like a fish pressed against the glass in an aquarium. They're [just] past the days of their misspent youth and are [just] beginning to come to terms with the daily routine of adulthood. It's probably in this age group that I have encountered some of the saddest, loneliest people ... and some of the most free-spirited ones, too.
Which now brings me to those who are (or should be) past all that: we older people. Basically we're a bunch of kids at heart, except that we don't have anything to prove. We're more aware of our comfort zones and are more tolerant when things don't go our own way. We've "paid our dues", you might say.
Of course I'm generalising. There are countless exceptions to my overt, crass, stereotyping. My point is that whatever age grouping you identify with you'll probably agree that it has little in common with the others.
