I love Instant Messenger. It was made for people like me; people who think that the best way to communicate with the world is paper, paper, paper (or screen). It's not that I'm not perfectly loquacious in reality ("too much so" might be one way to describe it), but that I'm very much more eloquent when my fingers, so to speak, do the talking.
MSN / Windows Live is my program of choice for communicating with my best friend and The Other Half, and Skype is the blood that runs through the pink-panelled veins of Shiny Media. It keeps me connected, keeps the mood-enhancing links and YouTube videos flying across the office ether and generally keeps things ticking over nicely. Except when it does the complete opposite.
Exhibit A: Every argument I have ever had with TOH has been over MSN or texting. It was during an argument on MSN, while I was busy telling him he was an indecisive cretin, that we got together; I hasten to add I did really know him in "real life". And it's all down to tone of voice. All those cliches about relationships ("It's not what you said it's how you said it." "Don't take that tone with me...") come to the fore when the best way you have of indicating sarcasm, a joke, a serious point is a cluster of bastardised punctuation marks.
Exhibit B: A friend of TOH's makes an offhand comment about my recent weight loss. I don't, infact, take it personally or worry about it in any way, but I'm pottering around at home, MSN bombs out for the forty-third time during that conversation and I don't bother signing in again. An email from TOH: "Has my friend offended you?". No... Why would she think that? Because of things that happen to people like Exhibit C, whereby my evil ex, never the most communicative person on earth, would just disappear mid-conversation because he was "hoovering" or "going to turn the oven on and getting distracted by the TV". Leaving me a paranoid wreck about just what the hell I could have said to make him disappear like that.
Recently, I've been making an effort to stop hiding behind words. I pick up the phone to text a friend and if it's someone I know would probably appreciate a phone call, I make it. A laugh in the right place, the ability to dig yourself out of a hole without having to type at 458wpm before they log out in disgust; these are valuable things. IM is now for work, for catching up with people who live a zillion miles away and just occasionally for doing the one thing that never leads to any arguments... flirting.
My name is Alex Roumbas and I'm a Deputy Editor with an IM problem.
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