On Chatting

I hate chatting.

I hate any form of communication that limits me to a set of characters. It's like passing notes with your girl... friends in class. It takes your mind off present issues and you can never express feelings as well as you could over a phone call or, preferably, tête-à-tête. We invented the phone, why get back to scribbling? I predict... no, I hope, that this chatting craze will pass, so we can return to real conversation.

Dont get me wrong, I understand the temptations of talking to people you dont know, never have met and most likely never will meet; the temptations of the unknown. Before we had internet there was a little thing called Shortwave Radio (it's still around from all one hears), the ability of talking to people across the planet, even helping each other. But this was actualtalking. This was conversation. You could tell if the person was male or female, you could guess their age sometimes and you could fit more thoughts into one sentence than most people fit nowadays into one single chatting session.

Today you can't tell who's who. Never mind their sex. And Avatars haven't made thing easier... just crazier. Our friends are no longer Joe, Jim, Suzy and Paul, but WHODAMAN558, AURORABEAM007, ILUVSJUSTIN2 and 2BSWIFTYALL, with Avatars like some ubersexy hentai, a hobbit in drags or -- which I think is worse -- a picture of some celebrity or model instead of ourselves.

Are we this low on self-esteem? Are we this id-confused? Do we crave this much to be a hentai or a hobbit or Shakira? Have we no humanity left in us to be who we are, or even better, who we can be? Why pretend? Why shy away from our real self?

Age of communcation my foot. We have degraded ourselves back to scribbling quaint notes with zero meaning and nilch communications value, but plenty of nothingness and sexual inuendos. We crave more after a digital Lara Croft than the flesh-and-blood variations, measuring a person's hotness no longer by their personality or looks, but rendering, pixelation and resolution instead.

And let's not even get into the Leet parlor, or 1337 or L33t or however you wanta spell it...

Example:

EMINEMSMYHER007: Sup bra
3354YEAH~: Nutn
EMINEMSMYHER007: coo
3354YEAH~: ye
EMINEMSMYHER007: brb
3354YEAH~: coo
3354YEAH~: u der????
EMINEMSMYHER007: kinda ;-)
EMINEMSMYHER007: sup
3354YEAH~: chilln
EMINEMSMYHER007: lol

and so on... I rest my case.

signed,

M633WHOSYERDADDY