As easily, as e-mail had killed real letters, instant messaging wiped out most of my casual communication several years later.
In the 1990’s it first looked like a miracle to me. One wrote something and it appeared on your friend’s screen in as little time as it took the electronic impulses to get there. But, as often is the case, “innovation”, integration and social adoption has rendered the service less and less usable to me.
As in the case of e-mail, I have nothing against the idea per se. Sometimes instant messaging is simply priceless. It made communication possible where phone calls were ridiculously expensive, later also replacing the phone calls with Skype and its clones. My 8-bit friends and I used IRC to death to discuss life, universe, everything and future projects. It was also ideal for on-line coordination. Later, when my girlfriend went for a long-term research stay abroad, IM was a great way of keeping in touch. So far so kewl.
But then, as the services developed, the first negatives started to show. We got used to logging in permanently, which brought the inevitable consequences of sometimes being contacted in a less suitable time, sometimes bothering others unintentionally. The IM services responded with introducing statuses such as “available for chat” or “busy”. Which of course required you to update them. Dunno about you but I often ended up “unavailable” for days because I simply forgot to change my status. Respecting others’ privacy, I learned to go for an IM chat only when I needed to arrange something, once again using it in place of a phone call (with the benefit of the receiving end responding when they had time).
Being logged in permanently also brought a kind of a reassurance. Those green spots signalized that my friends were there, alive and hopefully kicking. And not wanting to bother each other, we settled for exchanging this vital functions monitor for real communication. Later I would sometimes even get dressed down for committing the crime of not logging in to my Gmail account, suggesting that I was most probably dead.
The pleasure of potentially being in touch with someone turned into a duty, detracting from its cuteness once again. Add to it that in some companies it is a custom to communicate via IM, which sort of leads to mixing up one’s private and professional life, while I personally prefer to keep these two apart.
In my personal case, having most of my friends at the touch of a mouse button made us not only infinitely close but in a way also most different. We exchanged communication for “knowing we’re there”. Having the ability to communicate we ended up communicating less than before.
Perplazing.
I feel very much the same. While I value asynchronous communication especially for business tasks, I have a problem with modern communication ways to be so “in between”.
Thinking that modern tech would give us more time is proven to be wrong, in fact modern tech enables us to do the same tasks in less time, which soon translates into: we have less time for the same tasks.
Long time ago I had time for phone calls. 30mins? Not a big deal! Now I don’t have that time. Could I not write an email instead, which would cost me just a few minutes? Reasonable, but how come I spend more time reading/writing emails than I had spent on phone calls before? The reason is, of course, that I communicate more. I communicate with maybe 30-50 persons every week by email. But for each communication I can only spare a few minutes, and I shift from topic to topic a zillion times every day, not being able to really feel the topics, but rather to touch the topic casually.
IM communication does not feel like your chat by the fire in the night, nope, it feels more like our wife is calling while you are driving in a car to tell you that you should not forget to buy milk. This type of communication might be effective for certain situations, but it is not a decent replacement for anything having to do with leisure and time spent together. It seems that in order to feel like sharing thoughts and moods in a meaningful way we have to get back to directly meeting up, while in the past we could do the same with a phone call.