Monday, October 20, 2008

Status Message



I always enjoy checking out the status messages of my online friends/contacts when I sign in Yahoo!® Messenger. Maybe because of their diversity: from the verbatim to the personally tailored, from the trivial to the profound, from the lame to the overly creative, from the somber to the optimistic, from the hilarious to plain stupid rudeness, from the appreciative to the repulsive view of the world.

Status messages were introduced by instant messenging/chat providers to let users inform the rest of the online community whether one is available, offline, idle or busy. It's a convenient civil way of saying "ok, let's have a chat" or "leave me alone". Then it started to evolve towards the personal.

I am one of those people who usually speak to the world through status messages, and I believe that there are those who share the same pleasure in reading these. It's like a speaker-listener relationship. This only shows that no matter what's the medium or the venue, we all communicate. Everyone expresses sentiments. Everyone takes notice. Then there are some who shall respond. And I guess having personalized status messages is my subliminal way to solicit response. I reckon it's human nature. It's my nature to brave the social weather by letting people know my current status and by discovering theirs. My interest to status messages may be due to my inner desire to know other people's thoughts (even superficial) and feelings. You see, I'm always on a look out to people that I may be in a clash with and how I could formulate intra- and inter-personal compromise with them; in short, I adapt myself. I guess it's a defensive mechanism to eventually fit in the group.

Well, this is beyond the chat rooms.

But admit it or not, status messages are written all over us.

GMT -3 DST Sao Paulo, Brazil

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