Group Chat
Personally, I hate group chat; it just seems futile. The biggest problem is that there are too many conversations happening at once, and it’s hard to tell which statements belong to to which conversations. Intelligent discussion in chat room with more than five people is highy unlikely. Especially when the ADD people interject off-topic/useless comments every 5 seconds; it makes it really hard to keep up with any relevant comments. I usually just get frustrated, and stop participating, but that’s just my personality. In an actual physical group discussion I don’t usually say much unless I feel it’s relevant or adds something to the discussion, and I typically behave the same way online. Occassionaly, I interject an “lol” to indicate I’m still alive.
For a large group chat to work, like in classroom setting, there needs to be a set topic, otherwise people will wander all over the place. There also needs to be a moderator to keep people on topic and discourage off-topic comments.
The only purpose I have found group chat useful for, is to plan an event. Like, when I was in junior high and high school and my friends wanted to hang out; we would all get online and try to decide what we wanted to do, like go to a movie or get food. It was a lot easier for us to chat online than to call everyone seperately and see what each person wanted to do and then play phone tag for an hour.
