IM's impact on communication : )

People have a lot of ideas about what Gen-Z'ers like myself know or grew up with technology wise, often veering towards the idea that we have no idea what it was like before the internet and before instant gratification was God. While absolutely, the later half of Gen-Z (2002-) probably doesn't remember life before iPhones or beyond (!), the earliest children of our generation (1997-2001) actually has a fairly solid understanding of what that was like. 

the latter half of gen-z, essentially (see link for source)

I honestly believe that we got the best of both worlds, because while internet certainly existed when we were born and beforehand, it still wasn't all the way there yet in what we could do with it, and we used a lot of technologies that sort of carried over from the previous century or are at least familiar with the concept. When I thought about something I might do in terms of a technology for our presentations, I knew I wanted to take on a technology that had its origins in the 20th century, but evolved through the 21st. Instant Messaging was the perfect choice. 

this would have been my second choice tbh (see link for source)

While IM as a concept existed in weird, specific, places in the early years of its existence, the idea of instantly communicating a personal message to someone's device has prevailed and evolved into a practice that has truly revolutionized the way that we communicate with each other. IM went from operating from screen to screen on the same computer, all the way up to the iMessage app or Facebook Messenger that allows us to instantly engage with someone on the other side of the world if we so choose. 

the windows xp era rlly was a time to be alive (see link for source)

When I think about how crazy it is that this caught on so quickly and evolved so fast, I am even more floored by how it has increased efficiency in our school communications, organization communications, business communications, etc. We really wouldn't be as connected a society globally as we are today without IM building the way for texting and social media direct messages. Though I don't really know a way we could further build upon improving the technology, I think we can't rule further innovation out. I'm sure the people building peer-to-peer IM in the 60s and 70s wouldn't have been able to fathom the path their new technology would take. IM is a classic, yet futuristic field of technology, and I'm excited to see where it might go next. 

Origin Intel For This Post, Because I'm Too Poor To Even Entertain The IDEA of Plagiarism:

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