hope

Despite these shortcomings, there is still hope for real-time text based communications. While it may not be the best forum for full scale discussion or debate, based on the problems of a lack of immediacy of response and the rate at which the information coming in can be too much to handle, there is still room for people to gather to exchange ideas and participate in friendly, social conversations, which seems to be what this kind of medium is the best for anyway.

After all, here we have a place where people can be completely anonymous and be judged merely on the quality of their words and ideas yet maintain the social aspect that there is an actual person sitting somewhere else in the world listening to what s/he has to say. Non-synchronous communication methods such as newsgroups don't really give any indication that there is an actual person writing the words that are being read. Synchronous communications, however, give live feedback, proving that there is actually a person there and raising the whole situation to a social level.