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I started out on the internet a little later than a lot of nerds. I never had dial-up, never experiences BBSes, and I never did much with chat rooms. Still, it was 2001 when I got the internet, and that feels like a long time ago now. Back then, we had something called ICQ, I used it to waste time with my friends and harass the girls I went to high school with. My early experiences with the internet very much sprang from ICQ, it was where a friend told me you could get free hosting for your own website at a place called Angelfire, and it was over ICQ that many of the interactions which I discussed and parodied on that Angelfire site (which eventually became this site) came from.

After a couple of years of dealing with that particular piece of bloated software though, something happened. A girl I knew declared that she was switching to MSN Messenger, and desperate as I was, I had no choice but to join her there. I don’t know exactly how it started, but a trickle becomes a flood, and in time, everyone I knew who once used ICQ had switched to MSN. Sometimes, I wonder if it was that one girl who caused the entire switch. There was a strange divide too, Canadians had gone to MSN, and Americans had gone to AIM, nevertheless, we had all switched.

MSN was so much better, in so many ways, than ICQ, but it lacked one feature that I missed for a long, long time: the random messaging. On ICQ, you could search for people using just their name and location, it was easy finding acquaintances and local strangers. You could find the hot girl in your class, and occasionally, a random girl might contact you, and you could try tricking her into thinking you weren’t a mal-adjusted high school dweeb. I used MSN just as much as I had used ICQ, but the excitement I had about instant messaging faded and died with the switch. The novelty of talking to my friends without having to look at them stopped feeling like an adventure, and started feeling like an exercise in time wasting. But I’m a chronic time waster, so I kept it up.

Early on in my university career, new ways of using the internet continued to emerge. Rather than the concentrated, direct methods of communication that dwelled in email and instant messaging, ever more diffuse methods rose up from the aether. Social networking sites appeared, and they allowed people to do that thing I had missed so much about ICQ, that ability to try to pick-up near-strangers over the internet. I don’t remember why I joined MySpace, but like with most things in my life, it was probably for the chicks. I never really got into MySpace (most of my friends just never bothered with it), but I do remember trying to pick up the odd girl, and even got a date out of it.

Around the same time as MySpace, another trend came to be. Everyone I knew already had cell phones, but for whatever reason, they started using them to text each other. What at first was a novelty, became a trend, and the trend became a near-requirement for communication. With the rise of texting, came the downfall of IM; why sit at your computer and text for free, when you can text from your couch for money? Then, as with now, I remained too cheap to get a cell phone, and I just didn’t care. I was texting in 2001, it was called ICQ, and it never cramped my hands. The novelty of engaging in meaningless drivel-talk with people without gazing into their twisted faces or hearing their cracked voices had left a long time ago. I found fewer people were using MSN, and because of that, I was using it less.

Not long after the emergence of MySpace, another social networking site appeared from obscurity, and it was called Facebook. I remember why I joined Facebook, a girl told me to. Early on, it was just a few people on there that I knew, and I largely ignored it (logging on infrequently to check my messages). After a few months, that pattern appeared again, the few number of people I knew on Facebook became several, became many, became all. Facebook’s power is in its ubiquity. Now I can stay in loose contact with nearly everyone I know, and easily stalk the ones I don’t. There were only a few of the girls from high school on ICQ, but Facebook has all of the girls from university.

Months ago, I realized I had come to only ever use MSN (it was renamed Microsoft Live Messenger some time ago, I never stopped calling it MSN) to have drunk talks with one young woman, but I didn’t think much of my decline in usage. Then I started trying to pick up yet another woman, and my usage surged, but as the hope of that pursuit faded, I began to realize something: I hate instant messaging. It’s like talking to people without really talking to them, it’s communicating without any emotional connection. I’d argue that even emails and Facebook messages have more of an emotional presence, perhaps through the added time and effort people put into writing them, I don’t know. Even at the end, the ability to talk to women was what had kept me using instant messaging, but with a growing distaste for the sheer waste of time that it was, even their power waned. It was fun when it was new, and it was important when all my friends used it, but by the end, just a few weeks ago, it ceased to be anything but a time sink. I uninstalled MSN.