Practicum 6

So I've been frequenting the chat room for a couple days now. The rooms that are available are "Spanish Speakers", "Lesbian", "Latino Lounge", "Gay", "30 Somethings", and "20 Somethings".  Like I said in my previous post the online the only chat room that had anybody in was the "30 Somethings", and it had about 9 people in it. I wrote about trolling in my paper, and highlighted how I had encountered a couple trolls in the comment section of a Youtube. I was always curious about trolling. Today I let my curiosity get the best of me. I don't plan on going on Migente after this, and every time I've been in the chat room I'm usually ignored because everyone else in there are regulars and have a specialized language. So I decided to try and get everyones attention by trolling in the chat room. It worked. Not only did I get immediate responses, but the conversation lasted well over 30 mins. Surprisingly though no one booted me from the group, in fact, they seemed to embrace me after awhile. All I really did to troll them was call them names and talk negatively about Migente, and soon they started make fun of each other and badmouth Migente along with me.

I found it interesting how it took vulgarity to get people to respond. This whole time I've been trying to communicate with people on these websites by asking questions like, "what do you think of Puerto Rican independence?", or "How do you feel about Latinos portrayal in the media?" All of the responses I received from those questions did not lead to any substantial conversations or any sort of connection with the members. I guess people don't really want to discuss those issues in chat rooms. However, I feel like I would need to do more research and a thorough ethnography to make claims like that.