Imagine an enormous resort, filled with thousands of rooms. Imagine that there is a unique party in each room, and that each has little or nothing in common with any of the others. Imagine that each room may contain as few as one partygoer, or as many as several hundred.

This is the strange world of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC enables real-time communication between computer users around the world. It’s quite different from e-mail, where one types a message, presses SEND, and then waits anxiously for a reply. IRC is more like a party line - A pontificates, B commiserates, C reproaches, D consoles.

And the only charge for hours and hours of cybersocializing is the check that one sends to one’s Internet Service Provider each month. Even the Dime Lady would probably find it hard to beat that.

What could prompt thousands of netwits to spend so much time glued to their ‘puters? Consider the sense of community... just you, and two or ten or twenty of your closest cyberbuddies, in places scattered all over the globe, yabbering away to your hearts’ content about a subject of peculiar interest to you all.

The diverse patois spoken in these channels - think parties, gentle reader - is utterly fascinating. It is charming, for instance, to “listen” to the beautiful French spoken on the IRC #france channel. The brainbabble spoken in #mensa is most amusing. And the hillbilly spoken on the #bluegrass channel makes one howl with delight.

But ohhhhhh. . . imagine the ridiculous joy of a channel in which pidgin, the stepmother tongue of our beloved home, is the lingua franca.

Lucky You Stay #Hawaiihale

"Right on girl... you stay go come hea choke mo often... guarenteeee pick up erting!!!" a new friend told me when I first found one of the Hawaii IRC channels. I later discovered that folks who had never set foot on the sandy shores of these islands could chatter online in pidgin as if they’d spoken it (or thought they'd spoken it) from, ah, hannabutta time.

There are a number of channels to choose from, and each has its own lighting, mood and color scheme. Since I am often on the Undernet IRC server, I am most familiar with the Hawaii channels there. They include #hawaii, #hawaiihale, #aloha, #hawaiichat, and newcomers #bigisland and #the_hawaii_channel. By far, I found #hawaiihale to be the friendliest; clean chat is the rule, and harassment is not tolerated.

“This is the first channel I’ve visited!” announced someone on #hawaiihale the other day. “I saw the word ‘hawaii’, ya know - and I figured folks would be nice to strangers and forgiving to idiots!” Indeed, #Hawaiihale’s channel operators go out of their way to welcome everybody who comes into the channel, whether regular or malihini. Hugs are tossed about like draft beers. Myths of grass huts and skirts are teasingly encouraged... and then dispelled with roaring good humor.

Not surprisingly, all of the Hawaii IRC channels seem to have global appeal. Channel manager Maneo speaks proudly of the international visitors at #hawaiihale. “We see folks from Australia, New Zealand, England, Hong Kong, Norway, Canada, and Brazil,” he told me. Mainlanders seem to dominate #hawaiihale; many of them are emigrants, island-born or -bred. Maneo has even created a website for his channel, with a photo gallery of the regulars. Find it at http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/9977.

#Hawaiichat also has a homepage at http://www.t-link.net/~cmj/hawaiichat/, but it contains no photos or other information. It does, however, have a nifty little button that you can press to “See Who’s Online Now! Right Now!”

The fixtures in the Hawaii IRC channels vary quite a bit. Maneo told me that the median age of the regulars in #hawaiihale is twenty-five or thirty. But the #hawaii channel, another place on Undernet, is frequented by younger folks and students, many from these islands. As one might expect, #hawaii often rings with boisterousness and mischief. Snowball and food fights are commonplace.

Strong friendships seem to evolve on all the Hawaii channels, and they sometimes manifest in real life. From group picnics at Ala Moana to cyberweddings at dart bars in Pearl City, many local IRC users have taken their friendships offline. And it doesn’t end at the state borders. In a sweet gesture of cyberaloha, a Govea Portugese sausage gets shipped by an auto mechanic in Hilo to a real estate broker in Annapolis, who longs to return to the islands that captured his heart when he was stationed here twenty years ago.

These friendships can even save lives. My friend Pakalana told me about something that happened when she was still a Prodigy user. One of the regulars in Prodigy’s Hawaii chat forum was in an abusive marriage to a heavy drug user on Oahu. From her comments, her Prodigy friends gleaned that the violence was escalating. They gave her moral support and encouragement. And then, when the woman finally realized that she had to leave, her chat friends helped her escape.

“I was online for 48 hours straight,” Pakalana told me. “People from Prodigy got that woman and her kids out of the house and to the airport. Then they met her at every connection along the way, making sure she was never alone until they got her to her family on the mainland. They used beepers and cell phones to communicate, and to relay progress back to the folks online.”

Another dramatic illustration of the power and potency of this strange new world, and of the virtual aloha one can find here. . . if one only knows where to look.

Want to plug in to Planet IRC? The most common program for PC users is mIRC, and it can be downloaded at http://www.mirc.co.uk. Another common IRC browser is Pirch; you can find it at http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~frappa/pirch.html. Mac users, try IRCLE, at http://www.xs4all.nl/~ircle/.

Happy wandering. . . and may the foIRCe be with you!