They Call Him Fleep, Fleep . . .

Jeff Stuart has a job that didn’t exist until a few years ago. He portrays a dolphin named Fleep who runs a virtual tavern called CityPub on the Web site Talk City (https://www.talkcity.com). From his home office in Studio City, Stuart-as-Fleep spends about 30 hours each week greeting “chatters,” cracking jokes, offering up tidbits of news, culling out the creeps and serving up drinks represented by keystrokes. For example, c[_]~~~ is a coffee cup with steam wafting from it. He does all this while splashing around, virtually, of course, in a tank of cyberwater behind the bar.

Equally novel is the Talk City “Code of Conduct” that Fleep administers in his chat room. Talk City bills itself as a clean chat site, and puts its hosts through a six-week immersion course to make sure it stays that way.

This effort is one that Jay Langer, a Seattle-based anthropologist who began studying the World Wide Web culture three years ago, supports wholeheartedly. “The Internet has grown stale for a lot of people,” he says. “For others, it’s become a dangerous, frightening place.” Citing empty graphics and frontier-like lawlessness as the Internet’s biggest problems, Langer calls the Internet “Dodge City in need of a stern but pretty schoolmarm.”

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In much the same vein, Stuart characterizes Fleep as half cruise director and half hall monitor. He describes the hall monitor side of his job as more than simply weeding out the incorrigibles who are there to type dirty words. It also means upgrading the social skills of his tavern’s patrons.

“We’ve discovered that behind the anonymity of a computer and a nickname there’s this disinhibition, which leads chatters to type things that they would never say in public,” he says. “What I have to do is tell them that they are in public and that they can’t snipe at people from behind the safety of a computer and get away with it.”

To deal with offenders against the “Code of Conduct,” Stuart has “banning” privileges that allow him to bounce unruly patrons out the door. Aiding him in keeping CityPub clean is a “bot” (an instruction embedded in Talk City’s programming) that automatically silences any chatter who uses one of several outlawed words.

Stuart describes the cruise director side of his job as reviving the art of light, meandering conversation. “CityPub is not topic-driven,” Stuart says, “so I don’t know what I’m going to talk about until I get there. It all depends on the chemistry of the room.” His mission as a Talk City host, however, is to make CityPub a place where the anonymity of the Internet is replaced by real people interacting in a human way. “It’s not about content,” Stuart says, “it’s about contact.”

Stuart sets this human-to-human tone by having Fleep engage in friendly, dolphin-like behavior behind the bar. Fleep triples everybody’s name, for example, ostensibly as a form of dolphin echolocation, and makes a point of finding out one fact about each patron. These simple techniques help Fleep interact with each newcomer as unique instead of a member of the herd. More important, they help Fleep recognize returning patrons and give them a “Cheers”-like welcome.