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Colin Macpherson reports on a very shallow investigation
IF you're thinking furry creatures that sleep in holes, then forget it -- that's for the environment section. No, I'm talking hi- tech stuff here. As anyone who knows anything about chatting on the web will immediately recognise, WOMBAT is net lingo for Waste of Money, Brains and Time.
Now, don't get me wrong; I think the idea of people meeting and socialising in more or less real time over the internet is fine -- lots of useful purposes can be served by it. However, as all cynics know, under every silver lining you find a cloud. I recently spent a day wandering around the back alleys of the chat world and I came away wondering what I'd gained from the experience.
My initial stop was at a group of about 20 people in a cyber bar. I'm not sure why I went there but it seemed preferable to teenchat and golf. At first I couldn't understand what on earth everyone was going on about. Besides there being several public discussions taking place simultaneously, the use of acronyms threw me completely; the sub-language had blossomed far beyond what I remembered from years...