MeowChat

[Jejune]

YOUR WHOLE PET
MeowChat: It's not just for crazy cat ladies

By Christie Keith, Special to SF Gate

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

In a sea of the über-hip at Austin's South by Southwest Festival last week, I was talking to SXSW panelist and blogger Liz Henry and mentioned MeowChatters, people who role-play online as their cats.

So did she laugh scornfully and make fun of the crazy cat ladies? She did not. She nodded, her eyes lighting up, and encouraged me to add information about the phenomenon to her wiki on fictional blogging.

Her curiosity made me think back to its beginnings. I first became aware of the existence of MeowChat in the mid-90s, when I was running the Pet Care Forum on America Online, but the exact moment a cat first learned to use a computer is not known.

I'm kidding, of course.

You can read the rest of the article here (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/03/20/petscol.DTL).

What do you think?

[Lori]

Honestly, I think it's kind of cute. It's creative, it's not hurting anybody, and it's a way to play around with identity in a way where nobody is misleading anybody else. I don't see the harm.

[Jejune]

I don't see any harm either. I just found it strange and interesting. Not my cup of tea, but not dissimilar to the kind of community we're trying to build here, in that they're creating a community.

[Mary]

Oh, lord, reading that sample of the dialogue -- that would drive me seven kinds of crazy to try to wade through that! Yikes!

I think it's bizarre but I don't see any harm in it.

[Jejune]

I AM intrigued by the fictional blogging brought up. I think it's mostly done by companies (Yowsa! I just stayed at Marriot and boy was it great! I don't think I've ever had such a good time as I did at Marriot!) but there are people who keep fake blogs, too. I think this could be problematic. Look at lonelygirl15 or whomever. Look at how fakers are regarded on internet forums. When people are building a community, anything false presented as true can shake the foundations of that community. The MeowChatters are obviously role playing, but others aren't. In a community, what does this mean? When does something cease to be something done for fun and become something that affects others? A fictional MySpace page - is that good or bad? (Disclaimer - I briefly had a fictional MySpace page. I only friended other people who also had fictional pages, but it may have crossed lines in some views. We were essentially writing a story through MySpace. It quickly got boring.)

[Jo]

I really don't want to be like my cats. They lick not only their bums but each other's bums as well. They also vomit hairballs. Having lived with cats long enough, I have no desire to escape into a cat personality!LOL

I don't really have an issue with it. If people are finding what the need doing this then I am all for it. It doesn't seem harmful in the least, just a little strange.