I am tired. Tired of a lot of things. So tired that I feel like becoming a hermit. I am so tempted to de-register myself from all the websites I am in, and to stop going online to chat. There comes a time when I find all these are starting to become meaningless.
When online chatting first came out, it was a big hit. I first came into contact with it around 1998. Then, there were chatrooms via websites like IRC, so sometimes during tutorials (especially those held in the computer rooms), some of my classmates and I would secretly enter a chatroom to see what we could find.
In those days, the chatrooms were for anyone, so we would end up chatting with a lot of people at the same time. I witnessed how my classmate would engage in cybersex, but for me, I would only go to those websites where I knew my friends would be in so as to chat with them. No cybersex for me, not in the past, not now and never in the future!
After that, there were programs for online chatting for individuals. All you need was to download the program and register yourself. I still remember the first chatting program I had was ICQ. My second ex was the one that sent me the entire program (who in turn got it from a classmate), so we could chat with each other late into the night, when my mum did not allow me to talk on the phone for hours.
Then, I discovered more and more of my friends and some relatives on ICQ, so sometimes we had a group chat, sometimes individually. I stopped using the program for a while after we broke up, as I was too distraught to even see him online.
I did not go online for a very long time, until 2005, when I officially signed up for MSN and Yahoo Messenger. That was when I stopped using ICQ altogether, since most of my friends have migrated to MSN. Although I signed up for both, I am more often online via MSN.
Since then, I have been online almost everyday. But recently, I start to discover - of all my contacts, how many people do I really talk to and talk with? As I mentioned in my previous post, my closest friends are those who are seldom or never online. All I need is to give them a call or leave a message or send an email and we can still chat.
There are some who are online daily, but I have never spoken to them. Which makes me wonder, why did we add each other in the first place? There are also some which I have blocked, since all they did was to spout nonsense and irritate me.
There are some whom I chat with quite regularly, and some nice people who bumped into me and have now become friends. Despite all these, I still get annoyed by cyber perverts looking out for a quick fling.
There are also websites like Friendster and now Facebook, which I am registered for both. Both of these websites are a good place for searching for friends, current and past, as well as future friends, and to find out what they have been up to, what is their status quo.
Because of the convenience of these friendly sites, anyone can then find you and add you. So in the end one ends up having to screen through so many people, a lot whom you have never known! After a while, one just stops using altogether because the activities then become meaningless.
Now that I am almost at the next phase of life, perhaps I need to start taking things seriously. There are more things in life which I need to pay attention to. The day will come when I de-register myself at all these websites. When that happens, I will also not be logging on to chat that often anymore, because there are always other forms of contact.
When online chatting first came out, it was a big hit. I first came into contact with it around 1998. Then, there were chatrooms via websites like IRC, so sometimes during tutorials (especially those held in the computer rooms), some of my classmates and I would secretly enter a chatroom to see what we could find.
In those days, the chatrooms were for anyone, so we would end up chatting with a lot of people at the same time. I witnessed how my classmate would engage in cybersex, but for me, I would only go to those websites where I knew my friends would be in so as to chat with them. No cybersex for me, not in the past, not now and never in the future!
After that, there were programs for online chatting for individuals. All you need was to download the program and register yourself. I still remember the first chatting program I had was ICQ. My second ex was the one that sent me the entire program (who in turn got it from a classmate), so we could chat with each other late into the night, when my mum did not allow me to talk on the phone for hours.
Then, I discovered more and more of my friends and some relatives on ICQ, so sometimes we had a group chat, sometimes individually. I stopped using the program for a while after we broke up, as I was too distraught to even see him online.
I did not go online for a very long time, until 2005, when I officially signed up for MSN and Yahoo Messenger. That was when I stopped using ICQ altogether, since most of my friends have migrated to MSN. Although I signed up for both, I am more often online via MSN.
Since then, I have been online almost everyday. But recently, I start to discover - of all my contacts, how many people do I really talk to and talk with? As I mentioned in my previous post, my closest friends are those who are seldom or never online. All I need is to give them a call or leave a message or send an email and we can still chat.
There are some who are online daily, but I have never spoken to them. Which makes me wonder, why did we add each other in the first place? There are also some which I have blocked, since all they did was to spout nonsense and irritate me.
There are some whom I chat with quite regularly, and some nice people who bumped into me and have now become friends. Despite all these, I still get annoyed by cyber perverts looking out for a quick fling.
There are also websites like Friendster and now Facebook, which I am registered for both. Both of these websites are a good place for searching for friends, current and past, as well as future friends, and to find out what they have been up to, what is their status quo.
Because of the convenience of these friendly sites, anyone can then find you and add you. So in the end one ends up having to screen through so many people, a lot whom you have never known! After a while, one just stops using altogether because the activities then become meaningless.
Now that I am almost at the next phase of life, perhaps I need to start taking things seriously. There are more things in life which I need to pay attention to. The day will come when I de-register myself at all these websites. When that happens, I will also not be logging on to chat that often anymore, because there are always other forms of contact.
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