She sort of stumbled over the next sentence. I leaned in to look at her screen, and she said, eyes trained on the perpetrating sentence, “Chat, is this even real?” 

I blinked. 

Eleanor* had come to the writing center I work at with an English paper. She was a regular of mine, and we had a sort of goofy relationship in which she made her lack of focus an inside joke and I smiled patiently until she kept reading. She used slang like this all the time, terms like “meow meow” or “sigma” that I pretended to understand. “Chat” was one of her favorites. 

This term of hers is a more recently-developed slang word. Its use began with the rise of streamers, who play video games for an online audience. When they address their audience, streamers call them the “chat” because of the chatbox the audience can use to interact with them. 

It’s a weird sort of situation. The streamer is alone in the room, but surrounded by an audience, witnessing to and commenting on their every move. 

Some linguists have argued that “chat” is the occurrence of a fourth person pronoun. (Note here, chat, that I am not making any linguistic assertions. I’m processing this information just like you.) These theories go in a couple different ways: that the fourth person is an occurrence of collective perspective, in which the narrative voice represents the community rather than just the individual who’s speaking; of meta-narrative, in which the narrative voice comments on its own story or addresses the act of telling the story itself; or of the impersonal, in which the subject is generalized and impersonal, and no particular character is emphasized. Either way, these linguists argue that this act of interacting with an audience who is not physically present is an unprecedented sort of thing. 

The theoretical ideas I’m most interested in here are the first and second: the acts of collective perspective and meta-narrative that “chat” represents. 

If “chat” represents a collective group speaking to/through one individual, this means that the individual—most often the streamer—disappears into the group. So when a streamer plays their video game, they are hyper-consciously interacting with the voices of (sometimes) hundreds of other people. 

If “chat” represents the meta-narrative, this means that the individual is commenting on their own story as the audience would. So the streamer edits and comments on themselves as they play their video game. 

So—hang with me—the streamer must act with the voices of countless others in their heads in order to narrate on themselves. 

Return with me to Eleanor’s use of “chat” at the beginning of this post, because this slang term gets weirder. People use this word in real life. 

So here’s my question. 

If a streamer uses “chat” in order to interact with their audience online and to use their comments in the chatbox to edit his/her own actions, then how are people using this term in real life? Who is the audience? If there’s no chatbox, where is the input coming from? 

When Eleanor uses the term with me, when she asks, “chat, is this even real?” she isn’t asking me anything. In fact, I would argue that she’s not really asking. By referring to the “chat,” she is imagining an audience who can see, in this case, the writing she’s brought to me at the writing center, and she is imagining that they can comment on it negatively (if they so choose). Thus, she is asserting that she knows her actions are not perfect before her audience can tell her. 

This is one of the effects of the internet: An imagined audience becomes real as soon as a person turns on their phone and flips to the camera. And with the birth of “chat,” the people around me are commenting on their actions (which is an act of metanarrative) for the audience (therefore representing the collective perspective) before that audience can condemn them. It’s almost a justified act of paranoia. 

What does this mean, that we have begun to edit ourselves in daily life because of the (often) shaming voices that live on our phones? What does “real” mean when our audience lives in the pockets of each person around us? 

I’m unsure. Chat, any thoughts? 

*Name has been changed for privacy. 

Kate Wilmot

Kate Wilmot (’24) is a Grand Rapids resident who has found herself in the in-betweens of undergrad and post-grad life. She is an avid children’s fiction reader and a globally-minded cook who will feed anyone that walks in her door. You can find her losing to her husband in pickleball, weight lifting, or getting coffee with her mom.