I’m torn. See, back in the day, at any given time I had around 15 to 20 people I talked to online on AOL or AIM chat. I’d spend a little time in chatrooms. It was just how it was.
Now it seems that life is much different And this is where the me being torn comes in.
Chatrooms of the java variety largely exist only in certain spaces and are used only so much anymore. There can be no doubt that this is an AMAZINGLY GOOD THING. I mean, java based chatrooms are like Thunderdome for “playas” and people trying to hookup while being functionally retarded. Not that people aren’t like that, but at least I can pretend a little longer now that I don’t have to see it in my face.
On the other hand, chatting on AIM, Yahoo, msn, whathaveyou seems to have gone down overall as well (at least in my experience). I still talk to a few people online, but it’s much more based in facebook chat now, which means the people I talk to are generally people I physically know in some way.
Again, maybe that’s a good thing, but then again, I miss having random people that are from anywhere suddenly be in your life and you get to know them but they’re usually still just an icon and you know them from a space or a chatroom etc. It’s like slowly uncovering a mystery based on some shared interaction of common interest that lets you want to talk to someone here and there.
Of course, I think I’m being a bit nostalgic and all, and let’s fair; chatting online with random people was always kind of odd at best. Still, I am happy to lament the one thing I liked about the experience slowly dwindling. Then again, maybe it will be replaced by something even better one day.
