Instant Messaging: Virtual Community? LOL!
Written March 22, 2004

They said that the internet was a tool, a fantastic virtual environment ripe for the harvesting of unlimited information and knowledge. They said that the internet was a place where identities could be assumed and shed like Halloween costumes, an abstract playground where gender and racial signifiers no longer applied. They never said that the internet would replace the telephone, but it’s happening anyways. In dorm rooms and basement apartments scattered across Western society, ten thousand text windows blink in unison as bizarre acronyms and smiley-face icons displaying all manners of emotion spill out across the desktops of a techie generation. As idle talk extends into the early hours of the morning, grammar becomes progressively worse and lazy typos intrude upon the lowliest of sentences - but we don’t care. It’s communication without stress, an opportunity to feed our social cravings beyond conventional interaction. It’s instant messaging.

An entire virtual network has somehow risen in popularity amongst our children and young adults, miraculously embedding itself into our lives as a pervasive and essential aspect of social communication without attracting notable academic attention. Countless friendships and romantic relationships have been forged and broken within the digital confines of a text box, and IM (instant messaging) has become such an important aspect of our lives that we suffer social withdrawal and feelings of isolation after mere days of disconnection. While online chat has been studied a great detail in terms of identity construction and issues of anonymity, today’s instant messaging is a different beast entirely. Rather than connecting strangers with related interests, instant messaging is most often used to maintain or expand social relationships founded on a physical basis - to facilitate contact with people you know in ‘real life.’ As such, instant messaging plays a drastically different role from the online communities explored in the past. Rather than offering a virtual alternative to the physical constructs of real life, instant messaging extends your conventional social circles and interactions into a virtual environment where new contexts and social mores apply, offering an alternate forum to test your social prowess in. As this vast virtual network expands, so does its social significance. Instant messaging has become an integral aspect of sociability for a new generation, a technology to be taken for granted as an essential communication tool. My goal in this paper is to expose the unique and important role which instant messaging has filled in our social lives, to explore the nuances of this influential new form of communication and to generally draw attention to this new form of popular cyber-communication which has sprung up so suddenly in our midst.

The concepts behind online textual interaction have been bandied about for years, kicked like a theoretical soccer ball into the respective goals of MOOs, MUDs, IRC chat rooms and a wide variety of other self-contained communities before inevitably getting fished out of the net and examined for key social implications before being unceremoniously booted into the next virtual subculture. Julien Dibbell’s “A Rape In Cyberspace” is an example of this type of study, offering a personal account of the events surrounding a virtual rape in the LambdaMOO community and illustrating a key preoccupation which many theorists have with virtual social networking: identity construction. Dibbell immediately paints a picture of a world where one’s virtual representation is entirely unattached to a physical form or established identity, cheerfully stating that “Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I emerged as a dolphin instead [of myself]” (Dibbell 200). While a great amount of research on social interaction revolves around the fluid and malleable virtual self which appears so frequently in virtual environments, much of instant messaging bypasses this issue because of its social base in the realities of interpersonal, physical relationships. Popular use of instant messaging sidesteps the problem of abstract, fluid identity that plagues so many theorists attempting to comprehend online communities because solid ties to real life remove the infinite freedoms offered by virtual anonymity. Instant messaging relies upon pre-existing relationships to build its network and consequentially differs greatly from other virtual environments such as LambdaMOO in its social function and impact, creating a distinct rift between instant messaging and the vast majority of existing theoretical writings on the subject of virtual community. Although IM still offers users an opportunity to play with their identity in ways which will be examined later, a key element of anonymity is removed from the virtual experience. The theoretical soccer ball doesn’t quite fit into this goal.

In addition to reconciling the rift between physical and assumed identities which personify many virtual communities, instant messaging removes the rift between physical and virtual realities altogether. Theorist Howard Rheingold discusses the overlap between his digital life on the WELL network and his RL (real life) family in “The Virtual Community,” attempting to relate the manner in which his online life and real life were able to coexist. However, Rheingold clearly maintains distinctions between these two lives throughout his text, initially mentioning “My flesh-and-blood family long ago grew accustomed to the way I sit in my home office early in the morning and late at night, chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about words I read on the computer screen” (Rheingold 273). Rheingold is interested in the ways in which his physical reality and virtual reality coincide and flow together, a concept which relies on theoretical views of the internet as a site for the creation of unique ‘places’ in society. Rheingold’s seeming amazement at his ability to juggle these two different lives illustrates the manner in which internet communities are commonly viewed within society – as an alternative to real life with completely separate functions and levels of interaction. Instant messaging constructs a community that manages to offer new rules and guidelines for socializing while simultaneously remaining fully grounded in the consequences and realities of conventional life. Instant messaging is not an alternative ‘place’ of existence, but rather an extension of real life functions into a virtual forum. As a virtual community, IM networks differ greatly from the conventional examples explored by many writers. The very nature and purpose of instant messaging as a tool for extending real-life sociability tears aside the issues of anonymity and virtual ‘place’ that have been attached to virtual communities in the past, defining IM as an original medium of online communication for new consideration. It appears that the theoretical soccer ball from past research will never find its way into this net.

If instant messaging can be detached from previous conceptions of virtual community and viewed as a temporary virtual extension of real life interactions and relationships instead, what makes studying this new cultural phenomenon worthwhile? As I have previously stated, initial research on the topic of instant messaging has revealed instant messaging to be a staple form of communication amongst sampled teenagers and young adults. One study attributes the rapid growth of this virtual network to the desire for conformity, stating “Our participants experienced high and sustained IM use because of a desire to conform to and increase socializing opportunities with their peers. One participant offered that she started using it ‘because all my friends were talking, and I didn’t want to miss out’” (Grinter 23). This study also verifies my claims that IM communication is solidly grounded in real life relationships: “For high schoolers, the most active IM social groups mirrored those at school. Some of the students also reported having contact with distant friends they had either met during vacations or at former schools. The use of IM to maintain real space relationships with distant friends was even more pronounced with college students” (Grinter 24).While the overwhelming influence of instant messaging in youth socialization has been acknowledged and briefly discussed in similar articles, detailed examination of instant messaging culture and usage remains scarce to this point. Instant messaging must be examined simply because of the sheer significance that it now holds in our lives. For the purpose of exploring this phenomenon, I will largely rely on experiences and program features offered by Microsoft’s MSN Messenger which is the network of choice amongst my friends and acquaintances, although Mirabilis’ ICQ and America Online’s AIM offer many of the same options.

Instant messaging typically revolves around the ‘buddy list,’ which is the lynchpin of the IM networking system. Buddy lists are populated by friends and acquaintances who are added to your list through the acquisition and application of their related email addresses, and each buddy you attempt to add to your list is asked for some sort of confirmation before becoming part of your virtual network. This process ensures that everyone has some type of associational basis for attempting to come into contact with another user and maintains a solid connection with real life relationships. Buddy lists can frequently become a source of social tension as individuals attempt to consolidate others into the system and are often forced to ask for a desired acquaintance’s contact information from mutual acquaintances. I remember an argument that I had one night with a drunken friend who insisted on acquiring a boy’s email address from me so she could add him to her list and proceed to virtually seduce him. As her intoxication was massive in scope and her typing was consequentially incoherent I tried to deny her, only to be met with a barrage of typo-laden profanities and the silent treatment for an entire week afterwards. Although my friend’s reaction was probably unnecessarily excessive, it shows the social importance which IM users associate with the population of their buddy lists and the driving desire to continually increase their interaction with other members of this virtual community. The buddy list, with its ever-flowing list of names and pseudonyms, represents a constantly changing series of opportunities and resources for social involvement.

One’s level of participation in instant messaging and MSN can be sharply policed using various selected ‘statuses’ which, appropriately enough, advertise your conversational availability to anyone who has you on their buddy list and cares to search for you. These include anything from the enigmatic “Away” to the bizarre “Out to Lunch” and each has acquired specific connotations within the virtual community. If your status is set to “Online,” the default option, the typical message exuded is that you are actively seeking conversation. “Away” is more subtle, carrying meanings ranging from “I’m really here but I don’t want to talk to you unless I start something up first” to “I’m genuinely not here.” Away is coincidentally the neutral status of choice for many college-aged MSN users, who have unlimited access to computer use and an internet connection and typically leave themselves constantly connected to the network. “Busy” is the most meaningfully precise status, conveying the equivalent of a “Fuck off unless it’s really important” type of threat. These types of statuses are mimicked in almost all instant messaging programs and represent a unique way of indicating your currently desired level of involvement within the virtual network, allowing IM users to remain socially aware while avoiding overwhelming amounts of conversation.

A powerful interactive feature which instant messaging offers is the ability to ‘block’ individuals on your buddy list, essentially preventing them from seeing or communicating with you within the virtual community. This is typically utilized as a punishment or response to undesirable behaviour by the offending user. In many cases the punished individual is unaware of their blocked status, perhaps only noting that they have not seen the blocking person appear online in some time. The politics and appropriate uses of blocking are as broad and frequently inexplicable as most social altercations themselves – I once temporarily blocked a friend because I felt that I had been talking to her too much in the previous week. Blocking provides practitioners of instant messaging with the ability to self-police their virtual experience, removing undesirable individuals from the immediate sphere of sociability at will. In extreme cases buddies can be permanently deleted from your list, never to be virtually seen again unless initiative is taken to re-add them.

A theoretically notable feature of MSN is the ability to quickly and frequently change your ‘handle,’ or the name which represents you on peoples’ buddy lists and the virtual community at large. This is probably the single most important way in which people can project aspects of their identities into the virtual community. While ascertaining an individual’s physical identity is as simple as checking their email address, the various ways in which IM users choose to represent themselves can have a drastic effect on their interactions with others. Handles can range from a straightforward name to elaborate constructions of text symbols and connotative smiley faces. They can include music lyrics or quotations from literature to convey various cultural interests and affinities. They can reveal happiness or they can indicate bleakness. In a tragic example of the significance of handle selection, an acquaintance of mine finally killed himself after months of applying increasingly morose quotes and slogans to his MSN name. His parents claimed that he had never shown any outward signs of unhappiness, either at home or in personal social situations. In less drastic applications, many users use their handles to advertise their night’s plans, involvement in forthcoming events, or birthdays. Others use their MSN names as an opportunity to call attention to recent accomplishments or experiences, inviting friends to start conversations that ask for details. A handle is the first thing that people see when they begin communication on the virtual network, and subsequently takes the role that physical appearance generally plays in conventional social interaction. Handles become a means of presenting one’s ‘self’ to the virtual community and their selection carries many of the same elements of arbitrary identity construction that is seen in other online communities, despite a reliance on the real life identity of the IM user.

Instant messenger conversations follow extremely informal grammatical and linguistic guidelines, employing acronyms to represent common phrases and smiley-face icons to represent emotions and gestures. Certain practices, such as excessive usage of icons and excessively convoluted use of language, indicate a level of immaturity that occasionally serves to separate conversationalists of drastically varying intelligence levels. For example, my eight year old sister insists on showing me her large collection of MSN icons every once in a while but rarely has much else to say. I have trouble relating to her in a virtual environment because her written skills are currently far below her verbal abilities in terms of maturity. Much like verbal speech, practitioners of instant messaging often assume a certain style of communication over a period of time which makes them easily identifiable. In the event that someone jokingly hijacks an MSN account, acquaintances of the identity theft victim can usually discern that they are not, in fact, speaking with their friend within a matter of minutes. While emoticons can serve to add depth to the ‘flatness’ of textual conversation, misunderstandings can occur occasionally. The nuances of sarcasm are frequently lost in MSN conversation, often resulting in the misreading of a delicate social situation or utter confusion. The sheer level of diversity in which letters and pictures can be arranged and played with opens up instant messaging as a playground for linguistics, a site for the cultural reconstruction and modification of language itself.

Aside from the specifically unique set of social standards, conventions and mores that govern the social sphere of IM, instant messaging contains many features as a communicative device that provide users with significant social advantages. One of the most immediately obvious benefits that instant messaging offers is the ability to converse with multiple people simultaneously. As each individual conversation starts, a corresponding text box is opened and the need to multitask immediately kicks in. Instant messaging is commonly associated with the need to multitask – seldom are individuals using their computers solely to message others, but are often additionally working on school projects, choosing and listening to music, browsing web pages or performing a multitude of other tasks, both on or off their computers. This frenetic pace is embedded within the framework of instant messaging itself and becomes manifested when one is engaged in multiple separate conversations and required to maintain them all. I recall one instance when I logged onto MSN one evening and was immediately beset by at least ten text boxes all requesting my attention. Valiantly I tried to participate in each conversation, my fingers clattering around the keyboard as I tried to give each message box adequate answers and interjections. Ultimately I fell victim to my own human fallibility and aroused anger in several friends whom I had been forced to placate with a string of nonsensical smiley-face icons and monosyllabic commentary. Finally I made the executive decision to sharply regiment my fragmented attention and bowed out of half of my demi-conversations: “Sorry, gotta work now,” and “BRB phone,” being the most appropriate and acceptable lies for detachment. Multitasking is an integral skill for instant messaging and the ability to hold and manage numerous simultaneous conversations is not only a decided advantage that IM holds over other conventional forms of communication, but a completely necessary ability. Response time in an instant messaging conversation is often perceived as an indication of involvement and attentiveness, and unexplained failure to respond within several minutes of a received message is generally received with ire and resentment. Instant messaging is possibly the only mainstream social forum in human history where poor computer skills or typing speed can negatively affect one’s social relationships or status significantly. However, instant messaging offers the undeniable social benefit of allowing users to actively contribute to multiple social relationships at the same time, facilitating the maintenance of a much larger active social network than was previously possible using one-on-one intensive communications mediums such as the telephone.

Instant messaging is also frequently more convenient than the telephone. The system carries the unique advantage of revealing the availability of potential socialites before contact is even made. While phoning a friend at two in the morning is considered inappropriate because it disturbs the peace of their residence, sending an instant message to the same friend’s personal computer in hopes of response is always perfectly acceptable. In fact, MSN is often used as an answering service by those who are constantly connected to the service – I will frequently check messages on my computer before I bother looking at the phone’s answering machine. Additionally, instant messaging lends itself extremely well to quick, informal conversation. Many IM conversations are simply a small series of questions and answers, avoiding the hassles of greetings and ‘catching up.’ While chats can still devolve into pointless exchanges of insignificant news bites when one or more conversationalists are idly socializing or procrastinating, the informalities and continuous flow of instant messaging are well suited for the fast, catch-free acquisition of needed information when required. Although conventional means of communication are only utilized when actual interaction with another individual is required, instant messaging drastically expands social opportunities and exposure to others even when users are not actively engaged with the IM program. Night owls in a social circle can be identified simply based on their online appearances and spontaneous meetings in real life occur simply because two MSNers happen to be bored at the same time. Instant messaging networks open up opportunities for vague acquaintances to learn more about each other in a non-threatening environment, confident in the knowledge that their conversational partner is an actual person with physical ties to their social circle. I learnt more about a particular ex-girlfriend’s personality through late night MSN conversation than I ever would have gleaned from our mundane interpersonal interactions, and coincidentally saved myself hundreds of dollars in phone bills. Instant messaging transcends geographical restrictions, taking advantage of the internet’s virtuosity to maintain connections that may have been stretched hundreds of miles in opposite directions. In fact, programs like MSN make it possible for users to keep in contact with former friends and acquaintances who would have ordinarily drifted out of their lives as apathy and distance dulled the desire to actively maintain the relationship. I recently came back into regular communication with an old high school friend who had languished unnoticed on my MSN contact list for years, before I randomly messaged her one night on a whim. Instant messaging is rapidly becoming a necessary tool in the constant struggle to feed and nourish personal relationships as the world rushes onwards around us in a constant search for an increase in velocity to make things faster, more efficient and streamlined. The numerous advantages that IM communication offers to those interested in enhancing their sociability have elevated the network far beyond the level of a simple chat program or techno-hobby in importance, creating an invaluable service capable of drastically influencing one’s social life.

As instant messaging continues to impose itself upon our social consciousness and become an embedded part of everyday life, will we take greater notice? Instant messaging lacks the anonymity and virtual environment which makes most online communities such an appealing phenomenon to study, yet it represents a virtual community with more scope and influence than any other because of its strong ties to social relationships and interactions that appear in real life. As a communications tool, instant messaging contains features which cater specifically to the needs of individuals living in a sped-up world such as multitasking conversations, linguistic informalities and geographic irrelevance. In fact, many of IM’s benefits are so great that conventional means of communication, such as the telephone, begin to pale in comparison. Whether anyone will notice or not, the internet has spawned a fascinating alternative to the segregated virtual communities of yesterday – an online community which defies the carefully defined standards of ambiguity and virtuality and reaches out to encompass the vast resources and possibilities of mass society and popular culture.

Works Cited

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace” in Reading Digital Culture. Pp. 199-213. Malden : Blackwood Publishing, 2001.

Grinter, Rebecca & Leysia Palen. “Instant Messaging in Teen Life” in ACM Digital Library. 2002.

Rheingold, Howard. “The Virtual Community” in Reading Digital Culture. Pp. 272-280. Malden : Blackwood Publishing, 2001.