Instant Message, Facebook, Texting and Twitter

Estimated reading time: 5 minute(s)

Recently I was pondering this crazy social and technological trend our society has taken toward communicating in short bits of strangely coded information. We no longer speak to each other in the English language. We’ve shortened it to strange acronyms or just improperly spelled words (often incorporating numerals) and we’ve also limited ourselves to 140 characters.

And that’s not even why I don’t like it. (OK, a little, but not totally.)

I actually took to instant message communication right away. All the way back to my days as an AOL subscriber. (I shudder a bit to admit that, but come on, in 1995 everyone was an AOL subscriber! Just pop in the free disc you got in the mail and away you go! You’re on the internets!!) Instant message was a quick and easy way to send someone a message, discuss current plans, even send files to each other. And, we quickly learned to transition from well-crafted, complete thoughts in e-mail (like when we used to write letters by hand or by type writer… man, I am dating myself in this post…) to short bursts of thoughts, line by line, to the person who we knew was on the receiving end at the same instant we were sending them. It was cool.

Instant Messaging led to texting via mobile phones. As mobile phones became more ubiquitous (and much tinier! [Digression upcoming…] Does anyone remember car phones? My family had one that literally was the size of a large office desk phone that I believe was plugged into the vehicle in at least two or three ways, had a cord(!!) and a large antenna – on the outside of the vehicle? – to boot. Wow.)

So, as cell phones became all the rage, we transitioned instant message communication to phones. You could chat instantly with people wherever you were. And, being like and IM conversation, they could respond whenever they were able. A less intrusive way to communicate. Very cool.

But since the medium of communication was these phone keypads (remember when phones had just a number pad on them? you had to hit buttons two, three, or four times to get the letter you wanted) the words we communicated got even crazier. You’ve seen the shorthand. lol (“laugh out loud”), rotfl (“roll on the floor laughing”), brb (“be right back”), etc. There are so many, many more. It makes sense why, via this mode of communicating, we would need to shorten and abbreviate, but the interesting issue here is that these abbreviations have almost become the standard way to communicate.

Now that we are used to quick, non-English communication, enter social networking sites. First it was MySpace who was king of the hill. MySpace was nasty. As a web designer, I was appalled by the design of the site and its user’s pages. I was equally appalled by the user-generated content of the pages. Because of this, I stayed away.

But then Facebook opened up its pages to the world, and I was curious, so… upon investigation, seeing a much cleaner design, less offensive content (at the time, and to a degree, it still is) and some good privacy controls that limited who could see what on my account, I set up an account in May of 2007. (Yeah, I was a little late to the party, but as you’ve already seen above… I’m old!)

As Facebook grew in popularity in 2008, so did social networking in general. Lots of different sites offering ways to instantly communicate with friends, co-workers, even just people you don’t know. The biggest name to pop on the scene, probably mid-late 2008 is Twitter. You’ve certainly heard of Twitter. What began as a tech-geek adaptation of text messaging has now literally been adapted into our culture and even language. We were watching the NFL Network last night and they unabashedly use the verb “Tweet” throughout their broadcasts.

Crazy.

But why not? It has been a rather natural progression. Letters and memos and notes to e-mail. E-mail to Instant Messaging. Instant messaging to texting. Texting and Instant Messaging to status updates and “wall posts” on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. And then “status updates” via your mobile phone (which goes back to texting) through Twitter.

The difference for me—and the reason why I don’t use Twitter—is the target of your communication. I still use instant messaging… a lot. Probably mostly. But I do use my Facebook account pretty often, letting people know (in brief statements, though not limited to 140 characters) what I’m doing, or thinking, or feeling. The thing is, I know who those messages are going to. When I say something about me or our family, I’m saying it to a group of people I know. If I were to “Tweet” (I can’t believe I just wrote that…) my thoughts, they are literally blasted out publicly to the entire world (at least, available to the entire world) even if I am directing them to a certain person or group of people. The difference with the Twitter platform is that, the target audience.

This blog is broadcast to the whole world. So, it’s similar in that way. But I don’t post things here that I do post on Facebook. Because this is a public forum. I’m not sure if that’s completely it, but I really think that’s the main difference and reason that I still haven’t found a use for Twitter. (And why I am so fascinated by how widely it has been embraced… why are we such exhibitionists today? Perhaps it’s just easier to do, and on a bigger scale today.)

So, pick your poison: IM, texting, Facebook, Twitter… they’re certainly here to stay, and shaping the way we communicate. I’m not sure it’s for the better, but it’s certainly more than a fad. And when these particular ones fade, I’m sure new ones will crop up.

Communication will continue. I’m hoping that coherent, English, grammatically correct, well-presented thought will.

we’ll have 2 c …