Tutorial Task 1.3 – What is IRC?

So, “What is IRC?”, you ask? As an avid user in the late 90s and early 2000s (I seemed to have been quite an avid user of everything, don’t I?), I feel like I could reference myself in this post, but alas I will attempt to use some proper sources.

IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, and is a program, founded in 1988, that is used predominantly for real-time internet text messaging in a group context. Users download and run an ‘IRC’ client, connect to a server and join channels of interest to them. These channels can be named after the city or country one lives in, after a band or after a favourite pastime, the possibilities were endless. And if your desired channel did not exist, you could create it and other users could join.

IRC  isn’t just focused on group/community based chatting, users can also chat in private, join channels that were created for the purpose of data transfer (sharing/downloading movies, mp3s etc) and play games. This made it very popular in the late 90s when access to ‘illegal’ downloads wasn’t as easy to come by as it is today, and when a lot of ‘chat sites’ were web based and required constant refreshing and were slow and tedious. IRC can be likened to being a much larger version of ICQ or MSN, but is community focused, rather than being more ‘private’.

It is documented that millions of users still use IRC, with over 150 million downloads of popular IRC client mIRC recorded in 2010, but it is hard to gauge an accurate figure. I personally left IRC because the people using it, whom I had been interacting with for years, were getting a little too close for my liking. I would never contemplate using it again, as the thought of conversing with virtual strangers is no longer my cup of tea, but I do know of many people that I used it with 10+ years ago that still frequent the same servers and socialise with the same people that I used to know.

IRC seems to be somewhat popular still, but personally, I think with the creation of MySpace, Facebook and the popularity of MSN, this version of chat and ‘social networking’ has been made a little redundant. But then perhaps that is because I’m 30, not interested in meeting strangers online and making inane conversation with them all day long? Perhaps it is also because I am a little jaded.. hah!

References

mIRC Co. Ltd. (2010). mIRC: Internet relay chat client. Retrieved January 23, 2011, from http://www.mirc.com/

Viha. (2005). Internet relay chat: Information about IRC. Retrieved January 23, 2011, from http://www.irc.org/history.html