Switch it off.
1. reading it becomes a distraction from what you should really be concentrating on.
2. you may not like what you read and become tilted by it.
3. you will make far more money from playing good poker that the one time in a hundred you get someone to pay off a bit lighter than they normally would had you not spent the last half hour trawling through an online thesaurus for alternatives to the word "donkey".
4. its a newbie thing.. newbies sit at their computers with their sungalsses on and actually believe they are influencing the game with their trash talk when in reality the decent players haven't even got it switched on and the bad players are bad regardless of what's being said in the chat-box.
5. being as you are asking about the use of "chat" as a tactic, your next post will likely be asking the merits of using the timer to give misleading
tells... I'll save you the time and trouble and tell you now its yet another newbie-fail-tactic.
Just concentrate on learning to play good solid poker and forget about the gimmicks.