A Lament for MSN Messenger

So, news has broken that as of October of this year, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger program will be closing its shutters once and for all. This might not seem like a particularly big deal, nobody’s really used MSN in quite some time (apart from the Chinese, for want of anything better that isn’t banned by the government), but to some, it marks the end of an era.

Everyone has that little clutch of cultural memorabilia tucked away in some dusted corner of their minds that evokes puberty. The bands who helped us through that first, crushing break-up, the TV characters whose struggles seemed so synonymous with our own, that one toy that you just couldn’t grow out of playing with and that particular pair of shoes you wore until they fell to pieces.

Allow me to paint you a picture with my imagination-brush: enter a blue bedroom so littered with dirty clothes, CD cases, musical instruments and half-finished drawings that it could either house a madman or a heroin addict. A faint veneer of sweat hangs in the air, sealed in by the perpetually closed windows and drawn curtains. The visceral thrashing of Machine Head’s Through the Ashes of Empires is playing so loudly, it’s threatening to shake the video game posters, photographs and home-photoshopped movie quotes from their crusted blu-tack foothold. A litter-bin almost overflowing with Kit-Kat wrappers and Dr. Pepper bottles is positioned to be within ideal throwing distance from any part of the room. There at the desk, sat hunched at the computer, bent forwards in a position that would cause him considerable aching issues in later life, face lost in an unkempt mess of almost-curly shoulder length hair is the occupant. Callum Davies: age 15.

It’s not a particularly romantic image I’ll grant you, but that was my teens, if I wasn’t sat in a friend’s living room/bedroom/shed surrounded by equally grouchy peers drinking cheap beer and playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, you can guarantee I’d be at home, confined to my lair. I’d have a cursory Revise Wise page open, ready to throw it up in case a parent would happen by (this was in the days before tabs), a game of Counter Strike: Source ticking over and inevitably, I’d be on MSN. We might take our Facebook chats, our Skypes and our Snapchats for granted now but at that time MSN messenger was a social necessity. Texting cost money, the idea of using a mobile phone for voice calls was fucking preposterous and if like me you lived in the sticks, getting around meant you had to have at least one willing parent available at any given moment, bit of a tall order.

Accordingly, half the bedrooms in the country were a chorus of those funny little ‘do-do-DO’ chimes that indicated you’d received a message, the excited ‘bing’ that indicated someone on your favorites list had signed in and the infuriating burble of someone nudging you (I recall a friend of mine who figured out how to disable the time delay so he could do it over and over and over again, I swear I almost murdered him).

At that age you hadn’t yet figured out the best way to communicate in specific contexts, so MSN became something of a crucible of drama for many people, myself included. I had raging arguments, broke bad news, received bad news, started relationships, ended relationships, even the first time a girl told me she loved me (and vice versa) it was over MSN (appropriate). In some ways it was also a prototype for many of the other modes of communication we use now, Skype seems so commonplace and there’s infinite amusement to be gained from the glorious randomness of Chat Roulette (when you aren’t being sexually propositioned) but before any of that we were all sat in front of MSN broadcasting an utterly pointless muted feed of ourselves staring gormlessly at our computer screens via webcam.

It all felt like it meant something, from our arsenals of animated icons to the delicately crafted rolling usernames and signature tags (I tended to favour depressing song lyrics and quotes from Red vs. Blue). Along with MySpace, Bebo and a flurry of other social networking sites that would flare up and vanish in a matter of weeks (I still get emails from WAYN, I don’t even know what it is), it provided a framework for our social lives. Your early teens mark the time when you really learn how to interact, how to hold conversations and really get to know people for the first time, the conduits for that are always going to seem significant, no matter how silly/derivative they might be. Hell, I remember some pretty serious social schisms being filtered through a text-based online game called Bootleggers, ludicrously.

MSN of course eventually fizzled out. Some time around 2008 Facebook chat took up the mantle and we all began to drift away from MSN, it was one less program to have open. I still went back every now and again, a friend of mine from college and I would return to it every summer so we could enact our running commentary of the E3 conferences (appropriate), but now even that time-honored tradition has fallen by the wayside.

Am I sad to see MSN vanish for good? Not overly, ultimately you remember the phone-call, not the phone you were using at the time. I do however recognise the influence that it’s had, it raised the first generation of people who really understood online messages as a valid means of communication. All the nomenclature and etiquette that comes with it now started there, your lols, your brbs, which emoticons best convey which tones (I find that the :P face is a good one for sarcasm, never been sure why) and how long you can feasibly wait to reply before you look like you’re ignoring someone. It’s the kind of thing linguists will be excogitating for years to come. So fare thee well MSN, I’ll always remember the chaotic 8-person conversations, the inventive ways we found to draw genitalia with keyboards and the ever-present knowledge that my time would have been better spent going outside and actually doing things.