An era of being normal

The era of MSN-ing will finally come an end soon. In fact, it has already started to retire with the emergence of smartphone apps like Whatsapp and Wechat which make people stand, sit and move with their heads down. Heads will only go up when these people want to take photos of food, themselves, their pets and anything else that can make it to STOMP.

Windows Live Messenger, which is the messaging service's actual name that nobody really uses in casual talk, was slated to become history today, March 15. But the date has been pushed back a few weeks to April 8. Probably for some who still cannot come to terms with the impending cessation of their beloved tool for gossiping.

Gone are the days where you irritate the hell out of a friend with continuous nudges only to see him offline for the next day because he decided to block you. And gone are the days when you rather not email colleagues to communicate so that more spice can be added. And and and gone are the days when you were an expert in high-speed multi-tasking, be it in school or at the workplace.

Microsoft announced in January that existing MSN acconuts will be migrated to Skype. The long-time rival and loggerhead of Apple Inc. gobbled up Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion. This means that MSN and Skype accounts will be merged together. It's like having an Adobe Flash player with an operating system, something which iPhones don't.

Nowadays, people prefer to switch between two different screens (one big one small) instead of focusing on one because the smartphone addiction has gotten the better of them. For me, I personally think that it is more convenient to do work on your computer and MSN simultaneously than moving your head and hands towards your mobile device every ten seconds.

MSN has certainly gave us many memories. Whether it is good ones, not so good ones or just stupid nudges, they have become part and parcel of our interaction with technology. That interaction might not necessarily be a positive one but it definitely made life easier and looked perfectly normal to do it every day.

The same cannot be said for using smartphones.

Here's a quote by Gertrude Stein all my readers out there (who are most likely reading this on a device which you hold in your hand(s) to think about. "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

By the way, Gertrude Stein was a writer (heck, nothing do with science or tech) who lived through the 1800s and 1900s and did not know about iPads, Twitter and Instagram then. What a far-sighted man.