What is a chat room?

Is it just a bunch of wire, computer code, electricity and silicon? Or can a chat room take on its own feel or vibe. Indeed, could it be possible that a chat room could actually harvest a reputation?
I think a chat room is sometimes like soup - ahla the story of the soup-stone. Really without the ingredients, stone soup is just hot water with a damn stone in it. But there is always gonna be the other ingredients, it's just the way things go.
So, to continue the analogy - the ingredients are the people that inhabit the room. And together they can either make a soup that just tastes awesomely delicious, or possibly like vomit, or somewhere in between.

So, the chat room itself can have no personality. but I am willing to be proved wrong about this, because it partly conflicts with another theory i beleive - called psychometrics (bare with me here) .... at least that's what i think it's called. The internet seems to think different.

The best example of psychometrics is the case of James Dean's death and the car he died in - called Little Bastard . It was a violent death, but probably no more so than any other road death, but somehow that one incident imprinted an 'evil' vibe into the car from then onwards. There were many reports of the car being involved in people being injured or killed - people who owned the car, or just went to look at it.

And so anyway - i think houses, rooms or individual spots in the countryside can all take on this sort of latent memory - or emotional memory of an event - this is the acute result. But also it could be a gradual build up of one particular vibe due to a person or people habitating the one spot over time.
It can be any emotion too, not just anger. It could be a feeling of serenity, or reverance, or physical energy, or fatigue.
Anyhoo, there's no scientific device to prove this yet.

So if this theory applies to a physical space, then why not a virtual space? Because it is just virtual....?
hmm, i dunno.

If the surroundings are nothing, then the people who inhabit it must account for a lot - right?

Ever been in a chat room, or instant messaging and felt white-hot rage, fear, doubt, lust, love, at-harmony-with-the-universe, or cracked up laughing (literally 'Rolled On the Floor Laughing My Arse Off') ----- All because of words on the screen?
The words add up to a fair bit for sure. They can be very direct, producing equally direct reactions like teeth-gnashing, a heightened pulse rate, or laughter. But what about the more subtle feelings?
Depending on your environment, you might have a choice of colour and typeface to express yourself in. Also there is boldness/unboldness, italics, underlining, AND CAPITALISATION.

:^) ...... These also acount for something, and all together these things accounts for something (when talking to another person and 'feeling' them out, but on the whole these functions are clunky - are either on or off - and rely on the assumption that the user of the functions is actually using them with intent,
eg.

Yak sox:  what did you do today, Patsy?

Patsy: JUST CHILLIN

It doesn't quite work, eh?

Another important factor when eeking out the state of another person in I.R.C. or instant messaging is timing. That is, the time it takes for one person to respond to another. Those familiar with how comedy works, will know the importance of timing in the delivery of a punchline or comeback. Here, it really only suffers from one uncontrollable variable, (modem lag) thankfully this isn't too common. Through pauses two people could be on opposite sides of the world and still get a feeling for each other's mood. eg. long pauses for tired or distracted or doubtful,    or quick to react for enthusiastic, energetic or revved up.

Included in the time and response factor are human variables. A person might be a one-fingered typist, or has a hard time reading the computer screen because of eyesight, or being wasted. But these are part of the person and so, should be taken as such.

Even when all these things are added together - words, typeface, colour etc. and timing, I still think there is something more there that creates the impression of the who we are talking to.

This is my theory: regardless of distance and all the different connections involved, when two or more people are communicating over the internet - they are infact touching - enough that one another's 'vibe' can be felt. Here - this is similar:

'Martial artists of ancient China claimed they could judge how good another martial artist's fighting ability was by mere feeling or sensation. They were able to gauge another's skill by the amount and speed of their internal power, rather than by assesing their physical condition.' (From The Essence Of T'ai Chi by Waysun Liao, Shambhala, 1995, pp. 49)

These folks could do this just though shaking hands. The differences are - that they were physically touching without technology in between, and that they were consious of measuring the other. And of course, over the internet, figuring out another person's fighting ability isn't always the first thing on the agenda. In our situation, the information is recieved through the body - fingertips - and unconsciously processed by the mind. And the end result could be something like, 'I got a really good feeling about this person', or 'They kinda spooked me', but more often than not it's a feeling that just can't be put into words.

I think it's even more likely that all the wires don't matter at all, and the visual representation of the words of another on the screen are just a cue, or a crutch, and that our minds are bridging the gap with low level telepathy.
I know this sounds fairly far out, but it's possible - and worth considering.
I'll leave you with this:
Body language is a well recognised area of social science nowadays. There are experts on it, and it is even being taught in 'How to get a job' workshops. Yet if we were to travel back in time and try and explain body language to the cave dwelling people, they would laugh at us and then probably eat us.