Instant Messaging

In the years of the telephone, communication was limited, especially between young people, college or university students in particular. It costs money to make a phone call, and even more money if that phone call is long distance which is common when you're a university or college student. A new day has dawned, this is the day of instant messaging. Gone are the days when you set aside some time once a week to call your friends who are off in other schools. Talking to a pal now is simply a click away on any computer with Internet access. Instant Messaging has irreversibly impacted social structure, giving new face to traditional methods of interaction. The speed at which Instant Messaging has came upon us begs the question; how has society been
He envisioned that electronic mediums would begin to return society to it's old ways of perceiving the world. This retribalization of the world was known as the "global village" theory. This theory long preceded the days of the Internet and IM, but McLuhan believed it could be applied to all forms of media. What the "global village" theory implies is that the more electronically connected we become, the closer we become as a human race. These theories bear striking relevance to a current theory stating that Instant Messaging is creating a new form of isolationism, and that people spending long hours with nothing but computers is non beneficial to society. Another current theory reminds us that we're a society of instant gratification and that history has already defined our reaction to new and better things. Primitively, we were walkers, then we found horses, then we built cars, and now we can fly, hover, or take the high speed train. So should society be looking for answers by mining the endless resources and theories of our current knowledge base? Or are the answers already in front of us, nestled in the abstractness of media as a whole. It seems as though all theories, whether they be for IM or against it, scream change. According to MacLuhan, this makes perfect sense being in that it's not the nature of the change, it's the change itself. According to statistics, something must have changed. Millions of people are using IM on a regular basis so something must have been replaced, modified, or eliminated to compensate this new medium. If it is true that change for better or worse is irrelevant, and the tools we create in turn reshape us, then seeing the "message" being delivered by IM is trivial. It's just a matter of looking at our society before IM, and looking at it now; the change is obvious. Since it's the youth of world that seem do be leading the pack in