My friend and I were having a discussion about online chatting and the phenomenon of “edited emotions”. We were, of course, chatting online. With no voice, gesture, touch or expression, we agreed, all one had were words in a blank space. And most of the time, these words were carefully selected, spruced up, strung in a pretty sentence for the benefit of other people. The person you were chatting with would put across only what he or she wanted you to know. It lacked the tang of immediacy, it had none of the revelations, the countless hooks and pulls of actual human presence.

The virtual world, I decided, was full of people making a frantic sales pitch for themselves. Suddenly, everyone was impossibly clever, funny or complex. And everyone lived deeply interesting lives, as was evident from their status updates. You found yourself addressing people in pensive black and white, gazing soulfully into the distance from interesting angles, hinting at previously unplumbed depths. Others sported pictures indicating a keen joy of life — lolling on beaches or smelling flowers. Then there was the wild party picture — people looked amazed by what a good time they were having, the graduation picture — complete with hat and gown, or the quirky picture — a kangaroo. The idea, it seemed, was to be an attractive fiction of yourself.

This world has developed its own means of expression. Animation can be conveyed through a liberal use of capital letters and punctuation. Most things make people LOL (laugh out loud) or ROFL (roll on the floor laughing). You can employ a range of emoticons to laugh, cry, smile, scowl, wink, grimace or look sheepish. Some of these online expressions have never been seen on a human face. The virtual world even has its own etiquette: you can declare yourself ‘available to chat’, or ‘busy’ — which means people are advised to leave you alone.

Still dwelling on edited emotions, both my friend and I typed “sigh”. But we might not have even had this discussion had we not been online. In fact, many conversations that take place online might not have happened otherwise. Online chatting has evolved into a new form of communication, a mysterious alchemy of key and screen. As scholars observe, it is neither “written speech” nor “spoken writing”. Words, instead of being spoken out loud, progress from thought to print.

For all its absurdities, that small, square chat window on the computer screen is a curiously enabling space. Things that might never have been spoken are typed out. Freed from the limits of physical presence, both your own and the other person’s, conversations spin in unpredictable and often exciting directions. With no recourse to physical gestures, you are forced to be more articulate and concentrate on the content of what you are saying; words are thrown into sharp relief. Everything that is said is recorded, and you fashion an impromptu script as you chat. The online chat session has seen the birth of many a blinding insight on literature, relationships, time, space, politics and gastronomy. Some of the best lines and puns can only be typed out. Home truths and confessions fly thick and fast. As friends and family scatter all over the globe, meeting and talking has become a luxury. The chat window, with its own whims and vagaries, its peculiar dynamics of interaction, its economies of speech and thought, has grown into an alternative social space, halfway between the real and the make-believe.