The one thing that never changed.
by Dani Foscarini
Senior Narrative Designer
I remember when I was 12 or 13 years old and I started using mIRC. People met on chat rooms (wow, that sounds prehistoric!) and took the opportunity to open conversations in pvt — I didn’t even know that this was an abbreviation for private. I made several friends at that time thanks to mIRC. It was very useful for an embarrassed teenager to be able to chat with a computer as a shield.
It is interesting to remember that this lookalike MS-DOS program, which today seems rudimentary, already had features such as an automatic joke generator and the possibility of showing everyone in the room which song you were listening to (in your Winamp, probably).
The internet was still dialed in, so most people expected to hit midnight to pay only for the first pulse.
It didn’t take long for MSN to emerge and become popular. Bye bye, mIRC. Now everyone used that incredible program that allowed the exchange of messages in a super friendly interface. Added to this, being a mix of a conversation platform with the possibility of sharing photos and files, just like an email. And MSN had some other tricks too, like emoticons (yep, the first emojis!), the personalization of your status (available, busy or even offline, nobody could see you, but you were there) and, even a somewhat uncomfortable feature to call your attention — the MSN literally shook the other person’s screen to show that you wanted to talk to them. It was also possible to activate an option that showed everyone what you were listening to — which leads me to believe that people really wanted others to know about this.
I, like everyone at my school, spent hours there, chatting. I couldn’t imagine that MSN would also be discontinued one day. Which didn’t even take that long.
The truth is that we have seen life and death (and sometimes the rebirth) of a lot of things. Before social networks, everyone had their own blog. Before Instagram, people had Fotolog. Before Facebook, we Brazilians used Orkut. Before Messenger, Whatsapp and Telegram, there was ICQ, mIRC and MSN.
I open parentheses to another curiosity that comes to my mind: I bought my first smartphone around 2012, by then my cell phone was a Nokia that today looks like a Paleolithic artifact. At that time, surveys indicated that it would not take long before the majority of the population accessed the Internet by phone (most would do their first access using a phone). I couldn’t understand how people would waste their time using the internet on devices like that, with such bad navigability. Yeah, I thought that way. Although at that time there was already the iPhone and all other smartphones that came on the treadmill. They only took a little longer to become popular in Brazil. Brief summary, if my friends and I spent hours texting on the computer, today 99% of Brazilians who have cell phones use Whatsapp every day.
There is a great chance that all these apps mentioned will one day become obsolete as well. And I don’t know which technology will take the place of smartphones. But regardless of what lies ahead, I bet we’ll be texting, sending videos, photos and audios, telling jokes, sharing the song we are listening to… And who knows, maybe on the other side, an artificial intelligence.
