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In my personal opinion, it is almost absolutely worthless. The concept , the basic principles are all right, Chat is something that went wrong because of its members, participants, and even the efforts of David Winet and some Hungarian students could not improve it in practice.

A list, providing opportunity to create virtual connection with dozens of students throughout the world: sounds very practical. We can communicate with other countries' students, who are also in connection with English language as a second language. WE could "chat" about interesting issues, about anything what makes our hearts beat. We can check each other's English, and learn by identifying the mistakes which occure . WE can even ask for some help in different themes if needed. We could get familiar with other cultures, the weltanschauung of youngs eg. in the Far East. Sounds great, indeed. But what happens instead?

We can answer silly questions about how to be a good drinker, although the person, who is so curious about this has forgotten to define what a "good drinker" means. Somebody who can drink a lot, a guy who can get drunk very fast and in cheap way, or somebody who can behave him/herself when s/he is under alcoholic influence? Otherwise, a Hungarian chatter had a good remark on this question. He wrote, that it is a topic that has nothing to do with a publiclist like Chat-SL, and in case he really needs an answer, they should turn to private chanels of communication. Quitting smoking is another topic, which is too private business to talk about on a student list, I think. Otherwise it is obvious, that noone can quit anything by using other's methods. It is only the question of will, and power over ourselves; the method turns out without any mental effort, if we have the will.

Topics like the origins of the egg and the chicken (I would rather use the word "hen", but never mind) are a little bit better. At least this one gives place for jokes, opportunity to be humorous, and say nothing at the same time. I really fell pity for those, who have to pay for the received messages to be able to read them. Buying an empty magazine is the only thing I could compare this to. This category also includes games, like "What would you take with you to the beach", or the riddles, that also appeared on our screens. Easy letters, easy humour on air, not bad sometimes.

My next category includes the self-introductory messages.This type of letters should have been the first in the enumeration, because in the first two or three weeks of the newly born Chat-SL, when there was not too much traffic, the messages were all about the joiners themselves. This is quite natural, everyone was new, this way of communication was also new for everybody. But as chatting has started, the joining messages kept going on . There are several problems with these letters: they tell nothing but names and places that are difficult to remember, they take a lot of place on the servers they are delivered, they are boring to read, and they cut the --theoretically possible -- fluency of thoughtful communication on the list.

I do not want to be blamed with intellectual snobism: I do not claim that instead of riddles there should be a highly intellectual, virtual conference on themes,like psycholinguistics or environmental problems of the Earth. The question of a chatter about the point of life made me feel the same disgust as the one about "good drinking". This is the oldest and most difficult question the phylosophers could ever ask, and I do not think that answering this ever-question is not the task of an international student list. Of course we may try to give one or more possible answers, but as far as I am concerned the effort will always fail somewhere .

Another thing what I have observed on the list is the fact, that none of the topics can be under discussion, they are not elaborated at all. Something new comes up, and the older ones are forgotten, even if they are much wider, uncovered topics.

As a conclusion, I can tell that the Chat Student List --between the present circumstances --is nothing more than a group of lonely, bored, in-several-ways-unsatisfied students, who do not have too much imagination, but possess a vast amount of time, and have access to a computer. To be honest, I can imagine far more interesting and more profitable ways of killing my time. Perhaps reading a (this time real) magazine might be more useful than chatting about Chio Tuo Lung's (fictive name) problems with becoming an alcoholic, or going dry.

Finally, I have to add that I appreciated the efforts of David Winet, Artemis, Beer, and others to get the list into higher dimensions of virtual relationships, and to help chatting to be directed to less worthless directions. They often tried to convert the discourse into something more serious, and after some unsuccessful attempts they tried to grasp the funnier topics to entertain the chatter society. Although there was not much success, I must say thanks for them.