The chat room has changed the nature of conversation. What used to be the natural flow of thoughts from the unconscious to the conscious, up through the lungs, over the tongue, and out the mouth, has now been expanded to occasionally include the fingers. This has consequences for the way we as humans view noise, voices, words, and even the very nature of communication itself.

In this new form of typed communication, reality is not quite as sturdy as it used to be. When you're talking to someone face to face, you can see them, you know exactly who they are, where they are, and what they're doing. If they want to make a nonverbal point they can use facial expressions or wave their arms.

In a chat or instant message application the rules of reality don't exist. This can in many ways make it harder to communicate. In chat you can't hear the inflection in their voice, see the expression on the other persons face, or even tell whether they are paying attention or not. They aren't really there, no reality, you are talking into the void, and are answered only by the silence of words floating back at you from cyber space.

However this lack of reality actually gives you some leeway in communicating that you don't get from a face to face interaction. In the void, with nothing but words and symbols to go by, you are completely free to write anything you like. Its like having a book, with you and your friends as the characters. You can type that you are sitting on a cloud, or battling a dragon, or anything you want, and without the restraints of reality to keep you grounded, there is no one to say you are wrong.

In most chat situations you will have some constraints. People wont believe you if you say your sitting on the moon. However depending on the creativity and imagination of the people you are talking to, this freedom from rationality may start to loosen over time.

One of the major results of this situation is that people are developing more of a symbolic understanding of the world than they ever have before. In any age before this one life was lived primarily in the 3d world of objects and people. Now more and more, people go online to a world that is as wide open as an empty book, and rather than finding the same stale characters that the writer placed their years before, they are finding other living humans, all of them rich and complex characters with histories and lives and the ability to respond.

This is causing people to grow up less grounded in reality. That is a fact which is both positive and negative. On the one hand these children are not learning to deal with the nuts and bolts of the real world as much. However it also means that they are growing up with a greater understanding of creativity, symbolism, and a fiercer passion for art than any generation before.