Ruairi Devlin, a former cab driver and part-time magician from D·n Laoghaire, knows first-hand that pulling a rabbit out of a hat is, well, old hat. He went one step further. He, quite literally, pulled a live human being from an Internet chat room. In fact, she has also consented to be his wife.
Devlin (29) met Elizabeth Reid (19) from Florida on www.chat.msn.com, a free Internet chat room, in November 1999. But they only met in "real time" last January.
They first got together in a room with about 160 people from all over the world, so in some ways it's just as hit and miss as a chance meeting in a local bar. "It's extremely addictive," Devlin says. "Chat rooms have a language all of their own. We're an extremely close group.
"People might think, 'It could easily be a mass murderer', but you get to know the real people over a period of time. Neither of us was actually aware when it stopped being a friendship and turned into a relationship. One blended into the other." His fiancΘe is spending the summer in Ireland, and they plan to live in the US after they get married in September of next year. (They are even thinking of setting up a webcam at the wedding for those in the chat room who cannot attend.)
Chat rooms - and their acceptability - are certainly coming of age. There was a time, not so long ago, that no one, no how, nowhere would even admit to a little "flutter" in an Internet chat room. Those days appear to be over.
Private messaging, a service provided by organisations like Yahoo!, involves sending a long-distance friend instant e-mail-like messages which flash up on your computer screen instantly. Chat rooms are even more like "real time". But if you've never met the other person, they also require more than a leap of faith. "On the reality side, it takes a huge amount of commitment and trust to keep a relationship going with 4,000 miles between us," Devlin says. Cyber and reality are worlds apart.
You could also say they met in a cafΘ - an Internet cafΘ in Dublin. The fact that there was an ocean between them appears irrelevant.
"Cyber-relationships" can form even if the respective chatters are already married or spoken for. (True, this also happens in real life.) The difference, Devlin says, is that "in the eyes of the room, they are accepted as a couple. It's a totally different world. We had a case where a 'couple' broke up. Everyone felt the pain involved." For Devlin, Internet chat rooms have changed his life for the better. But not everyone is so lucky. The dark side to chat rooms has been well documented. Some chat rooms for teenagers have become breeding ground for paedophiles.
Psychologists, meanwhile, have warned about the addictive quality of the Internet when it replaces other social interaction. Anonymity, meanwhile, can bring out the worst in people - in chat rooms, people use "profile names".
Nom de plumes do allow people to step out of their traditional roles. On www.chat.msn.com, for example, one lady said she was a 21-year-old Australian model, but she turned out to be a 42-year-old mother of two. But Devlin says she came clean "eventually - that's how close everyone is".
However, chat rooms may also bring out deep-rooted feelings of anger in people, where they can vent their frustrations or feeling of powerlessness they have in other areas of their lives.
Other ways to avoid unseemly characters is to charge users for the chat room service. Irish-based MaybeFriends.com started charging members £10 per month, or £90 per year, in January. To date, around 2,500 are paid members, allowing them to use the chat rooms and attend events organised by the web site, rather than merely browsing the personal ads like the other 7,500 unpaid users.
Set up in October 2000 by Jill McGrath, MaybeFriends.com is a sister company of FM 104. Although the chat room has a code of conduct, it's self-governed. McGrath has only had one case where users reported a member for bad language. She believes that the "closed user group", which has an average age of 30, helps create a hassle-free chat room experience. "Those who pay to use our chat room are among our most loyal members," she says.
Most chat rooms worth their salt, therefore, have codes of conduct in order to monitor crude profile names, abusive chit-chat and people soliciting sex for money (for whom "chatting" is the last thing on their minds). In the US, for example, some chat room users have gone one step further and become self-styled guardian angels, whose mantra is that "behind every profile name is a real heart". Their mission is to encourage wayward users to treat people with respect.
According to those who run many Internet chat rooms, this includes telling the truth, avoiding abuse and not standing other chat room users up.
PLUS, the desire for sex may overtake the desire to chat, leading would-be chatterboxes to ask, "Where are you?" rather than "How are you?" While many people would never dream of walking away from someone in a bar without saying "goodbye", many online users log off without a moment's notice.
One of the first Internet guardian angels was a Boston-based individual with the profile name Stoodup, who appointed himself the conscience of one America Online chat room. He recruited other AOL users - none of whom he'd met - and began a campaign, gathering stories about members who were known for standing others up on dates. Stoodup e-mailed the accused and created an online newsletter, giving both sides of the story. Stoodup first met with hostility, but was soon embraced by AOL users.
Brendan Courtney, television presenter and co-creator of Wanderlust, also devised an RT╔ chat room. As the site is linked to RT╔, it's well "patrolled". The members have even met up for socials in Dublin's Zanzibar.
Still, Courtney believes the American guardian angels should get a life. "This is pure American sentimentality," he says. "You will always get an extreme 5 per cent of users who will be insulting. But it allows you to get an insight into the type of insanity you might have to deal with in real life."
It's easy for people to be rude or abusive when they can hide behind an anonymous online presence, Courtney says. "It's like being in a car surrounded by metal. If you have a disagreement with someone online, people can just ignore you by logging off. They can just be that extra bit ruder. But you can tell if people are genuine, even if people are being something their not. If you become addicted to chat rooms and are unhappy using them, the chances are you may already need therapy."
Courtney acknowledges that many people who use these chat rooms don't just want to chat. "On a web site like gay.com, some people do want to chat, but many others will ask you your age, sex and location before any other details. Within 20 minutes you'll have an offer of sex. But that's the type of diversity you get on a web site with 11,000 people online."
Although the Wanderlust web site is closed for the summer while the programme is off-air, it's been a useful forum for those who watch the programme to get to know each other, Courtney says. But most users, he adds, use it as an accessory to the rest of their lives. "I obviously pop in and out to say 'hi'. But I'm a TV presenter, I like to show off and hang out in real bars! You'll always get that hardcore element online who use it all the time to talk about love, life and death."