For the first time in years, I chatted through IRC. Amazingly the last time I used it, I was about 14. Honestly with all of the IM clients available now IRC just seems dated. But technical issues aside, for this assignment I decided to go back in time. I basically picked up right where I had left off. My new identity: the 14 year old me.
That identity shouldn't be all that difficult to pull off (admittedly, it's the identity I often end up regressing to on weekends). However, it was the social context that made my identity an interesting choice. The IRC channel I joined was focused around computer hacking.
Anyone who has ever come across a hacker chatroom, thread, or website knows that the people who frequent these social spaces are... well a bit protective- if not outright aggressive towards people they consider "outsiders."
To tell the truth, my "fake" identity never even got off the ground. As I entered the room with 4 other chatters in it, I was immediately asked, "asl?". My response of, "14 M pittsburgh" made the others in the room laugh. For the next ten minutes I was drilled left and right with technical questions. Most of which, I (let alone the 14 year old me) didn't know the answer to. I was accused of being a script kiddie, and told that I was giving hacking a bad name. One chatter told me, "Real hackers are artists... you're the kid who grafittis the word SHIT on the side of a portajohn."
I never really got a chance to manage my impression, because it was already managed for me. I don't think there was anything I could have said to convince the other chatters that I wasn't a digital vandal. Their minds were made up, and no amount of "impression management" would have swayed them.
After about ten minutes of insults, the 4 other chatters started to leet speak, and refused to chat in English until I left the room. The experience was very frustrating. The whole time I couldn't help but think I would have gotten a significantly different reception had I explained I was 21 year old Cornell Engineer. While the impression management aspect of the assignment didn't really take off, I definitely FELT like a 14 year old who wanted to tag along with the big kids.
It was definitely interesting to see how far our minds can go with just those three little letters... "ASL?"
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It sounds like you went through a lot to complete this assignment. The hackers seemed to pick up a lot of assumptions just from your “asl”; they immediately assumed that you had no knowledge of technical matters, simply because of your age. This seems to tie back to what we covered earlier in lecture with over-attribution due to lack of nonverbal cues. I also thought that you brought up a good point in explaining how the hackers ended up making an identity for you. Without even giving you time to introduce yourself further, they pegged you as an inexperienced, immature fourteen-year old trying to fit in with “cooler” people.
It is sort of comical that your arrival as a fourteen-year old seemed to unite all the other chatters in an attempt to humiliate you. I thought that their attempts to exclude you from the chat were childish; it seems as cliquey as middle school. From your experience, it looks like the hackers had been stoking each other’s egos so that they could form an elite group. I was a little surprised by the extent of their sense of community. It is somewhat remarkable that they managed to form such an exclusive group online.
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