Continued: Damn the running man

continued from "Damn the running man"

It's only later, when I recount the story to my friend Nora, that I realize how hurtful his words really were. His screen name promptly joined my list of blocked buddies.

At the click of a mouse, we can be anyone and contact anyone and say anything we please. With no immediate consequences—so it seems.

Oh, the power.

“And with AIM,” Ambrosetti says, “you have the security of knowing that while the person you’re talking to may be naked, they at least aren’t going to be on the toilet.”

But they could be. On a laptop, with wireless or a really long internet cord.

Oh, the uncertainty.

“That’s another negative of IM,” Corneille says. “You never know who you are talking to.”

I get a sinking feeling that AIM has crippled our face-to-face interactions as well.

Flash back to last year, over dinner in the Nicholson house up in Massachusetts. My youngest sister, Rachel, tells my mom that field hockey practice is cancelled the next afternoon. “Oh, and BTW, Mom, don’t pick me up at the gym.”

Even my sisters and I are a little surprised, but my parents just get this quizzical look and await an explanation. BTW? That’s not even a word, and there are two more syllables in those three letters than in the three words it’s meant to abbreviate: “by the way.” Maybe we’ve just become lazy.

Have we all completely lost the ability to express ourselves, to verbalize our thoughts, to tell others how we feel to their faces?

Those smiley faces certainly don’t help. What if you want to grimace? Or indicate disgust to the point of vomiting? Maybe AOL should develop a system in which students can insert their own faces into a message and then adjust their expressions. Like those websites where you can make George Dubya look like an alien. That would almost be like real interaction.

If she could add any emoticon to the basic list, Corneille says she’d add a drunken smiley. “And I would delete the stupid one with the foot in its mouth that looks like it’s smoking something.”

Is this faceless interaction breeding a generation that can’t interact without a keyboard and a masked identity?

“It’s not like we are spending our entire lives talking on IM. There is still plenty of social interaction that takes place normally. I think of IM as like a supplement to social interaction, not taking the place of it,” Corneille says, though she acknowledges that she’s a “bad phone talker.”

Roller admits that instant messaging is really impersonal.

“Not as bad as e-mail though. And yes, it’s a good thing; it facilitates and makes communication easier, and in most cases, healthy cases, doesn’t replace other more substantive methods of communication.

“But IM does take away the personal edge of calling,” he adds. “Calling is better, more personal, more of a commitment. Maybe my philosophy is that IM should be for trivial conversations, while phone calls should be for everything else.”

Once upon a time, phone calls were the uncomfortable weekend visits of a disaffected step-sibling, compared to the unexpected arrival of a favorite uncle, the neighborly visit. Rewind to the pre-cell phone era, not too long ago, when students must have greeted peers on the path as they left lecture, rather than ignoring their physical surroundings to the tune of the Nokia jingle. Still, in this increasingly impersonal high-tech world, I guess you have to take what you can get.

Does Roller practice his philosophy?

“Mmmm, sort of,” he says. “I IM too much instead of calling. You win,” he finally admits. “I’m addicted!”

To those of us who have succumbed to the IM demon: Be brave, be yourself and sign off. A little human interaction never hurt anyone, except perhaps when it comes to romance. But not even Instant Messenger seems capable of mending the broken heart.

Whatever happened to the good old days, when boys asked girls out in person? Twice during freshman year, I was asked out via the yellow running man. Very flattering, but really, boys, where’s the romance? And if you can’t talk to that special someone in person, can you really have a relationship?

Perhaps. My roommate’s high school friend dated a girl via IM for three months.

Breakups, for that matter, should also not be conducted over instant messenger.

Friday morning at 3 a.m., my friend calls from Florida, crying hysterically.

“I broke up with Kevin,” she sobs.

I’m confused, not because it’s 3 a.m., but because she’d been talking about marrying Kevin for the last six months.

“What happened? Why?” I ask, fearing the worst.

“I dumped him. By accident. On IM.” She wanted a break. He didn’t understand and signed off.

In fact, instant messaging has become a breeding ground for embarrassing stories of failed romance.

“One time, I was talking to a girl who I hooked up with the previous weekend and a guy friend from high school at the same time,” recalls Roller. “And the message intended for the guy went to the girl. I’ll leave it at that. Tragic, but funny in retrospect.”

Maybe we’re just redefining our relationships, both romantic and friendly, through IM. Move over, phone sex. “AIM sex is the wave of the future,” Ambrosetti jokes. And after all, who can claim to be true buddies with everyone on their “buddy” list?

So we’re using fake names and speaking the IM language of abbreviations and adding new buddies who aren’t even really our friends and sharing our deepest, darkest secrets with possible strangers. Rather than solving conflicts, we’re blocking the people who create them from our buddy lists. And somehow, that’s addicting. Is instant messaging really so bad?

Whatever it is, Ambrosetti says, “It ain’t the devil.”