The present study investigates human interaction in a virtual environment, with focus on what roles the participants in the chat room takes (or gets), and the importance of the presentations of these roles when entering the chat room in order to gain contact with others. The mediaethnographic study was conducted throughout a period of seven weeks in 2002; hence the study is to be regarded as a pilot study.

The aim of this paper is, by looking at various roles used in the chat room sphere and the presentations of these roles, to enlighten the chat room as an arena of human interplay and to create an understanding for the specific forms of interaction that takes place within its frames. The interplay in the chat room was analyzed from an interactional theoretical base, such as Meads concept of role, Cooley’s metaphor of the looking-glass self and Goffman’s metaphor of front- and backstage. The study was conducted through three steps: participatory observations by being present in the chat room, online; interviews with participants, on line; capturing real time (i.e. emoticons, turn takings, time spans, etc) on DV-film. Data was collected by using DVcamera to film the chat room and in that capture the on-line interviews and observations which were made. Primary results of the study were: identification of five different “role-characters” based on their behaviour in the chat room, and the parallel use of multiple roles in different chat rooms simultaneously