The Woes Of Love And IM

You would think that all the new gadgets would make it easier to connect with people (ahem the male species), but after years of using said gadgets, I have concluded that this is a big fat lie that corporate companies have been feeding us. Think about this: way back when, the only way to communicate someone without actually talking face to face with them was to to send a letter. When they don't reply, you have millions of excuses. The guy delivering your message could have ran off with the post thinking that you sent money. His horse might have broken its leg and in a strange and long winding turn of events, the letter was never delivered. The messenger might have met bandits on the road and was robbed of everything, including your letter. Even when we fast forward a couple of centuries into a more modern mail system, lots of things could still go wrong. Cars broke down, boats sank, if you sent the letter "postage collect", maybe the person you're sending the letter to didn't want to pay for the letter and decided to return it to the sender instead. Now fast forward through a few decades, maybe you would send a telegram instead. Of course, a million other things could go wrong. The telegraph operator could have misinterpreted the message you wanted to send, for some strange reason, some weird technical difficulty might have prevented your message from getting through. Or when the person delivering the telegram might have lost it for some strange reason. Now lets fast forward to telephones. When telephones were first invented, every time someone called in one house in the neighbourhood, all the phones rang. Every household had a special ring so you had to learn to recognize your ring. That person might not call you because they're shy and they don't want the whole neighbourhood knowing that there's something between you two and its way too easy for other people to eavesdrop on your conversation. Now lets fast forward to emails. You might not get a reply to your email because for some reason, it got lost in cyberspace, or that person doesn't check their email inbox. The point is, in all the above ways of communication, there's always some excuse you can make to yourself as to why that person isn't replying to you, but with instant messaging technology such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc, there are no excuses you can make. You can see their status as clearly online and every time you message them and they don't message you back, you feel stupid and like you're obsessing over him or something.

As you can see, we were better off with the letters and the horses.