From the tin can telephone to...what?

When I was little, my siblings and I were obsessed by making every day things out of junk. It didn’t matter if these things were already lying around the house. We didn’t want the ukulele that my mother brought back from her senior trip to Hawaii; we wanted to make one of our own out of scraps of wood and some bright red rubber bands. The cute little doll house (plastic) held no appeal for us; we preferred the big sloppy one we made out of a tomato box, shingled with real mini shingles. So what if our ukulele sounded seriously twangy, or that our doll family’s roof caved in after a week? We were making something all our own! Of course, these fabrications led us to the classic tin can telephone. We didn’t stop at a couple of pork n’ beans cans, we tried cardboard orange juice concentrate cans, coffee cans, even a couple of “well scrubbed” paint cans that still left paint gobbed in our hair.

This early fascination with the many genres of communication can be seen mirrored in the Instant Messaging world. With over a dozen kinds of IM out there (Aim, Skype, Jabber, eBuddy, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, QQ, Xfire, Paltalk) IM users everywhere seem to just continue perpetuating their youthful “tin can telephone” interests.
When you consider the many evolved forms of communication out there, including email, telephone, cellular phone, fax, telegraph and good old snail mail, IM seems to be the child of a little portion of each technology.

IM can be used as a mini email, or a text conversation that takes the place of a phone conversation, and can cover huge divides in seconds. Many IM services allow you to share files, photos and even music between two users, and some even include video IM capabilities, so you can carry on a “face to face” conversation. Rather than keeping IM chained to your computer, you can direct IM’s straight to your cellular phone, and keep the conversation going. An extra perk that most services offer is creating an avatar or “WeeMee” to share emoticons and moods, allowing the digital image to relate the feelings of the conversation.
IM can be used to update Twitter as well, if you have AIM you can add “Twitter” as a contact and if someone says something so dashed witty you never want to forget it, and MUST share it you can simply send it to your Twitter, to be remembered "forever" or at least fifteen seconds :)

Still, looking back at the fun I had with my siblings making our tin can telephones, the best times we had were making them together. Try not to become so immersed into the many exciting modes of communication that you forget the charm of face to face interaction