ABSTRACT
Coming back to the communicative practices constitutive for social life in Cibervalle, we note that computer-mediated everyday life is far from restricted to the public level of the Forum communication. For more private chat, as well as for specific requests that need to be discussed instantly, the inhabitants of Cibervalle also use instant messaging. IM clients facilitate synchronous communication between two or more persons over an electronic network like the Internet. Most client programs can be downloaded from the WWW as freeware and can be installed on one’s own computer if it complies with the necessary system requirements. By means of an IM client, individual socio-electronic networks can be established. The IM client program used in Cibervalle enables one to add and remove the e-mail addresses of contacts with whom one would like to network. When logging into the IM client, a window pops up (the so-called ‘buddy list’: Figure 14.1) in which the collection of names shows which of the contacts are currently online. As soon as one of the offline contacts logs on, a corresponding message appears on the screens of the other users and the status of this contact changes from offline to online in the buddy list.
