Matt Bowen discusses one of his ideas of looking at "The Origins of Chess" for his Communications Methodologies class with Shipka. The premise sounds intriguing, at first. Later, when I am alone, I look up the subject to find that Matt is stepping into the Roman Coliseum to do battle with the lions. There are endless hits on the topic of the origins of chess and endless arguments by the scholars. The bottom line is, no one knows the origins of chess because so many cultures played a similar game. The main stress point is did it originate in India and migrate to China, then Europe or did it migrate from China to India and then to Europe, or did it migrate from India to China and Europe or from China to India and Europe. There's nothing but arguments without definite proof of anything.

Chat Room name identities is a benign topic. Exactly who was who? We never figure out N. Horstman, B. Bauhaus, or Shipka's identity. Naphtali never did get a copy of the transcript and this would have provided clues. This would have been a process of elimination. We could probably identify Horstman and Bauhaus from their interests, but Shipka would be the most confusing. She had a high degree and interest in popular culture; hence she would also be fluent in pop culture lexicons so she could be wrongly identified as either of the other two women. If one of the screen names said something about "beach" or "surf," we would immediately identify the person as Bauhaus but could also be misleading because anyone could have thrown those "buzzwords" to throw others off track.

For me the chat room becomes nothing more than a face to face social space where many conversations are going on at once. Because I'm a man and spent a great deal of time in loud environments, it becomes difficult to converse in social spaces with many conversations going on at once. I could concentrate on one conversation in such a space when I was young and drown out the rest but now, all I hear is sound and cannot make out the differences in the conversations. What does it have to do with being a man? As men age they are more likely than women to suffer from hearing loss. That's all, that's all.

Being online it should be different, but the text on a computer screen moves very quickly when several people are in the room chatting at the same time so it is difficult to focus on a text stream and then quickly respond to the stream.