I just wanted to provide some counterweight to people rapping on text messaging while glorifying face to face conversation.I feel that both modes offer specific advantages and disadvantages and I wanted to point out that neither is superior or inferior to the other. ” “Yes, hun.” *SMACK* Text chatting affords distractions.

However, for some reason the earlier versions eschewed things like offline messaging and message histories. Most of us (at least the sane) don’t industriously record every conversation we have with people. This is why people often interrupt one another; to make sure the points they wanted to make are stated before they are forgotten. Taking pauses to think is not always appropriate, viable or possible.

Efforts to bridge this gap, like the usage of emoticons in text-based conversation, merely constitute a poor substitute.

Another notion going hand in hand with this view is the belief that it is ‘better’ that a person spends time outside of the house, meeting people face to face at bars, clubs, fraternities, sports teams and so on.

While I do not want to take this dominant view of RL communication versus online communication head on, I do want to speak in the defense of the latter. Logfiles and message histories preserve our conversations .

Rather than simply being an inferior way of communicating, I’d like to point out some specific advantages of IM communication which may or may not be obvious. In the old days, ICQ used to give you little text boxes into which you typed a message, which would be sent off and disappear from your screen. When your online conversation partner gives you shit about something you supposedly have said, of which you are sure you haven’t, all you have to do is locate the appropriate logfile and present him or her with the cold hard evidence.