I actually rather dislike IM myself, but not for any of the reasons you stated.
"As a medium, it limits the types of conversation you can have, a fact that few people who use it seem to realize. It's great for quick q&a kinds of things, for planning a get-together, for entertaining quips, and nothing else."
I pretty much conducted an entire two-year relationship, and three-year ongoing best friendship, with chisparoja via AIM (minus two in-person visits of two weeks' and three weeks' duration). Due to this, I can tell you from EXTREMELY EXTENSIVE experience that IM is a very, very functional medium via which to (1) argue nonstop for days on end, (2) have really hot cybersex, and (3) have terribly deep soul-baring conversations that reduce both of you to tears of happiness. Therefore, I must insist that you have no idea what you're talking about when you make assertions like the above.
"Just to tie this in some way to what petite_tadpole asked for, here are my thoughts on people who don't follow implicit IM etiquette, for instance leaving a conversation mid-flight: so what? What function does telling someone that you're about to stop sending them entertaining quips really serve, other than to verify that you've not just been shot?"
Yeah, I tend to agree. chisparoja gets special privileges with me so I wouldn't sign off from a conversation with em without stating first that I was leaving, but in conversations with anyone else I frequently just stop responding after a while when a convenient opportunity arises (i.e., when the last thing the other person said was a statement that doesn't really require a reply), and then once the silence has gone on for long enough, IM etiquette ceases to require you to announce where you're going when you sign off, because there's no longer a conversation really "in progress" at the moment.
But now, as for what I really hate about IM: I hate the fact that if you just want to find one person, you can't easily arrange to sit around watching for them to come online unless you make yourself visible to 200 other people with whom it isn't a high priority for you to converse with at the moment, so when what you really want to do is work on something else until a specific person shows up, you tend to get messaged by 20 other people who won't let you get anything done. Granted, there are ways around this if you take the time to either register different IM names for different people and try to keep anyone from finding out what your other IM names, or if you individually block and unblock a few dozen names from your buddy list before each time you sign on, according to which of them you currently want to talk to - but those strategies are a lot of trouble, and they carry a risk of people getting offended if they find out you temporarily blocked them or didn't give them one of your screennames that you did give to someone else.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:54 pm (UTC)"As a medium, it limits the types of conversation you can have, a fact that few people who use it seem to realize. It's great for quick q&a kinds of things, for planning a get-together, for entertaining quips, and nothing else."
I pretty much conducted an entire two-year relationship, and three-year ongoing best friendship, with
"Just to tie this in some way to what petite_tadpole asked for, here are my thoughts on people who don't follow implicit IM etiquette, for instance leaving a conversation mid-flight: so what? What function does telling someone that you're about to stop sending them entertaining quips really serve, other than to verify that you've not just been shot?"
Yeah, I tend to agree.
But now, as for what I really hate about IM: I hate the fact that if you just want to find one person, you can't easily arrange to sit around watching for them to come online unless you make yourself visible to 200 other people with whom it isn't a high priority for you to converse with at the moment, so when what you really want to do is work on something else until a specific person shows up, you tend to get messaged by 20 other people who won't let you get anything done. Granted, there are ways around this if you take the time to either register different IM names for different people and try to keep anyone from finding out what your other IM names, or if you individually block and unblock a few dozen names from your buddy list before each time you sign on, according to which of them you currently want to talk to - but those strategies are a lot of trouble, and they carry a risk of people getting offended if they find out you temporarily blocked them or didn't give them one of your screennames that you did give to someone else.