Idk my bff Jill?

The other day, I was sitting at my computer discreetly iming Jen (LM) from Google Talk while ostensibly doing work. Aside from a couple emails, I haven't talked to her since the GCNA trip last month. So, it was nice to catch up on her (lack of) progress on sabbatical work, and I filled her in on life in the "real" world. The irony is that she had been making fun of my aim obsession when we were together in TN, but now she's gradually seeing the light as well.

IM is a very handy form of communication in many ways: it's casual and instantaneous, you can simultaneously send other types of information (links, files), and in some cases, it eliminates some of the awkwardness of a face-to-face conversation. (Of course, there are people for which conversations are painful over aim, or over any medium...but that's beside the point.) The key selling point, in my opinion, is the ubiquity and availability of the im. I wouldn't call people specifically to whine about the car alarm that woke me up at 6 am, but I could readily rant about this to half a dozen people over aim. In other words, it's much easier to keep in touch with people via aim without a lot of effort.

This got me thinking about how to define "keeping in touch" and ways to measure "closeness" in relationships. There aren't too many people I keep daily tabs on, but when I do, it's primarily through im. I'm not asserting that we will be better friends because I know what you ate for dinner or what you bought at IKEA today. Rather, if I'm in touch with mundane, everyday events in your life, you're more likely to fill me in on bigger issues as well. If I were having a mid-mid-life crisis, I would talk to someone I speak with regularly before calling someone I haven't spoken to for 6 months.

Panicked thought #1: maybe the primary thing I have in common with my best friends is that we are all equally obsessed with aim. Panicked thought #2: what if no one else I meet for the rest of my life uses aim/has grown out of it? Am I doomed to a series of superficial relationships? Before you laugh and point me to something called the "phone," I want to say phone calls are great, but if I used them with the immediacy that I use im, I'd have a helluva cell bill. Well, what did people do before computers? I'm not sure how they lived with themselves, but I'd guess that people simply communicated less often. So it's no good comparing contemporary times to the 19th century; our communication structure and behavior have changed so radically that it's irrelevant. A letter that spent 3 months traversing the Atlantic might have sufficed for keeping up ties at one point, but it wouldn't work for me.

Perhaps I'll go gripe about this on my away message now.