E-Bonding Via Voice on the Web

The wildly successful social experiment known as Internet chat has suddenly gotten a lot more personal. Voice chat--talking online rather than typing--is peeling away a veil of anonymity in a digital world where once the only limits on persona were imagination and spelling ability.

Next to e-mail and search, chat long ago emerged as the Internet’s “killer application.” Millions of people regularly haunt thousands of “chat rooms,” or virtual gathering places, typing reams of philosophical discourse and bitter arguments, tender love notes and profane insults.

But a new phase in the social evolution of the Web may be upon us. Voice chat is combining the free-for-all of the Web with a back-to-the-future party line, as Gloria Logsdon and Ralph Hockaday recently discovered to their mutual delight.

The two met on HearMe.com, the first World Wide Web community dedicated to voice chat. After a divorce, Logsdon, 44, moved back home to Leitchfield, Ky., a small town 45 miles outside Bowling Green. When she encountered Hockaday, 46, online last April, “something about him kind of grabbed me, though I wasn’t looking for anything serious.”

Hockaday, a corrections officer in Cameron, Mo., lost his wife to cancer about two years ago.

“After that, my life was going to work and coming home,” he said. Voice chat changed his life.

After many hours of increasingly intense talks online, the two met in person May 29. By then they knew each other well enough to spend 10 romantic days together in a cabin on a Kentucky lake. They will be married Friday.

They credit the breakdown of the Internet’s hallowed anonymity--the greater openness of the voice chat experience--for their new life together.

Experts consider them an unlikely vanguard for what may herald a major shift in Internet culture.

“The richer and more sophisticated these multimedia technologies become,” the more dramatically they change the ways people relate online, said Brenda Danet, an expert in Internet communications at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “There becomes the real possibility that text [chat] won’t even be here 10 years from now.”

Such projections seem well-supported by the flood of talkers stepping up to the microphone.

In August, about 908,000 people used HearMe.com (https://www.hearme.com) or a sister site, Mplayer.com (for playing and chatting about computer games), according to the New York Web-site-rating firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

The sites, run by Mountain View, Calif.-based HearMe, formerly known as Mpath Interactive Inc., claim 5.3 million registered members, with 10,000 added daily.

The company estimates that HearMe.com members average more than five hours per month on the service. If true, voice chat would be among the “stickiest” offerings on the Web--meaning that users don’t just click through rapidly but linger with unusual loyalty.

HearMe has licensed its technology to about 18,000 Web sites whose users can access specialized chat rooms on HearMe.com via those sites. Yahoo, the leading Web portal, uses HearMe technology for its instant-messaging product and is now testing voice in its general chat rooms, where the service has rapidly gained popularity.

Excite, another large portal, recently began to offer voice chat using a competing technology. A spokeswoman called the service “wildly, stunningly popular.”

If the vast audiences of Yahoo and Excite adopt the service widely, voice chat could soon become a must-have feature across the Web. Text chat is suffused with the mystery of intimate strangers and fantasy worlds.

While voice chat users often adopt pseudonyms and conceal personal information, the instant you open your mouth, volumes of information spill out, lifting the veil of total anonymity that purists view as the essence of Internet communication. For many, the loss is compensated well beyond the mere liberation of hunt-and-peck typists.

“Typically, people don’t actually trust each other until they’ve had a flesh meeting. [Voice chat] is getting part of the way to that,” said Barry Wellman, an expert on Internet communities at the University of Toronto.

The inherent revelations of inflection, laughter, accent--not to mention clear signs of age, gender, class or ethnic background--seem to put people at ease, voice chat enthusiasts say.

“When you first start talking to someone, you think, ‘Well, I might never see him again.’ And you end up telling him things that you might not say dating someone for six months,” said Logsdon.

Bill Buxton, chief scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc. and a leading authority on user-interface design, calls this disarming quality “hitchhiker’s syndrome”--opening up to the “safe stranger.”

That perception of safety has convinced many parents who use HearMe.com that voice chat is a better way for their children to explore Internet relationships. A 40-year-old predator would have a hard time pretending to be a 13-year-old skateboard whiz trying to meet other teens at a local park.

Hockaday’s 15-year-old son, Travis, frequents HearMe’s teen area, chatting regularly about video games, in-line skating and stunt biking with online friends from all over the world. Travis has never found an adult posing as a teen, he says, though as a precaution, “I just never give out my address.”

Some kids even find a sympathetic online ear, like the teen who popped up in the fortysomething area one night, Logsdon recalled. “We said, ‘What’s up, honey?’ She said, ‘I can’t talk to my mom, and I need someone to talk to.’ So we ‘locked’ the room and all talked to her.” With the locking feature, the originator of a chat area controls who can join the conversation, allowing privacy.

Meanwhile, voice chat has become a haven for lonely hearts. Text chat or e-mail passions can heat up rapidly, often cooling off when the correspondents meet in person and find themselves disappointed by someone who seemed to know just the right words online.

(HearMe.com also offers video, although the high-speed Internet connections needed for realistic video chat won’t be widely available for years.)

A Magnetic Attraction

Getting started with voice chat is simple for anyone who has a microphone-equipped Windows-based PC. (The service does not yet support Apple’s Macintosh computer.) Fill out a short registration form and select an on-screen name from the HearMe Web site, download and install a small piece of software, then log on via the same site and browse through the scores of topics offered at any time--from “general jabber” to romance, sports to “teen talk.” Click once to join any chat room, each of which is named by its originator--who can be any user. Logsdon, for example, regularly hosts a “Kentucky Woman” room.

People tend to listen in for a while, then with one more click on an on-screen talk button, the chattering begins. If only one person at a time can talk, people take turns. Some sites allow more than one person to talk at once, much like a telephone conference call.

Getting started can be even easier for regular users of Yahoo or Excite, and none of those voice chat services charges users. HearMe, not yet profitable, earns revenue from selling licenses to its technology and from on-screen ads.

The combination of easy and free fosters a frequently magnetic attraction.

“People tend to become junkies,” said Samuel Hartley, a HearMe regular. “I can go on at any given time and point out five or six people who are always on.”

Hartley gravitates to a community that captures the essence of voice chat: performers. Thousands sing karaoke, rap, rock, folk and gospel songs in groups of two to 20.

Some of the performers are accomplished vocalists--Hartley once sang hundreds of country songs on a single Saturday, taking request after request from chat room fans. But many are shy people testing their courage with sweet, raspy renditions of pop favorites. Listeners seem unfailingly charitable--a constant stream of supportive chatter fills the concurrent text channel of HearMe.com during almost every performance.

Such kindness somehow seems linked to the impossibility of hiding behind a totally fictional identity and contrasts sharply with the often brutal world of text chat.

Of course, voice chat rooms draw plenty of obnoxious kibitzers who toss insults or use profane language. On HearMe.com, the moderator of each chat room--the person who originates the room--can kick them out and keep them out. And HearMe’s volunteer monitors patrol for particularly offensive behavior and can cancel an abusive user’s membership, though such draconian measures are rare, according to Paul Mateucci, HearMe’s chief executive.

“Most of the vulgar behavior, ironically, is perpetrated by children,” who curse and make lewd remarks to try to get a rise out of adults, he said.

Topics within chat rooms refect the vast diversity of the Web itself, ranging from the sublime (attaining world peace) to the ridiculous (why men have nipples), the reverent (prayer meetings) to the offensive (white supremacy). Inevitably, sports and sex command huge followings.

Some use the service more pragmatically. Dwayne Harris of Atlanta, a 28-year-old computer network manager and frequent traveler, saves up to $400 a month by creating a locked HearMe.com chat room for himself and his fiancee, talking for hours toll-free.

But much of the chatter simply kills time, with friends meeting online daily to talk about everyday life. Those regulars’ sense of community seems to give voice chat its compelling and potentially durable character--a replacement for the local pub or even church in an increasingly digitized society.

Emotional Affinity

And like text chat communities, many voice chat groups develop into mutual-aid societies.

David Gray, a retired real estate manager in Austin, Texas, runs a Web site (https://www.adoptionsearching.com) that helps adults who were adopted as children connect with their biological parents. He keeps an “adoption searching” chat room open on HearMe.com about seven hours a day, making himself accessible to coach the seekers.

“It is very personal. It involves all of the deepest, darkest secrets. I’m a birth father who gave up a child for adoption in the 1960s,” he said. “Ten years ago, I tracked her down and it’s been a wonderful experience. I’m trying to help other people do what I did.”

This sense of emotional affinity derives, in part, from the immediacy of hearing the other’s voice, experts say.

Silicon Graphics’ Buxton wonders, however, whether such a transition poses hidden risks.

“When people are speaking, they’re probably going to bring the preconceptions of the telephone with them, rather than of the computer,” he said. For example, a computer has the capacity to record everything you say, akin to a wiretap--a rare and usually illegal practice over a phone.

“And if somebody is really good at lying, you might be lulled into a false sense of security that prompts you to take risks that you might not otherwise take,” Buxton added.

Other experts suggest that the very openness that relaxes and entertains many voice chat users can close off avenues of interaction that make text chat uniquely equalizing.

“One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it lets communities be formed around shared interests rather than shared backgrounds,” said Wellman. Not knowing whether someone is male or female, black or white, 18 or 80, leads to unusual intermingling.

Wellman fears that if voice chat ultimately crowds out text chat, it could ghettoize the Internet. Indeed, many HearMe.com members tend to congregate with people a lot like themselves, mirroring communities in the real world.

And hearing a voice pretty much precludes textual cross-dressing and “avatars”--virtual characters that serve as cybernetic alter egos--which have become enduring icons of online culture and endless sources of material for researchers and humorists alike.

If such fantasies faded away, the cultural character of the Web would be changed radically and not necessarily for the better, some experts argue.

“The magic of text-based chat,” Danet said, “is that there is this bizarre combination of anonymity on the one hand and intimacy on the other.”