Smartphones have become a part of us – always turned on, always within reach to connect us with friends and our world. Essentially they are our life support systems, and with this comes our constant interaction with social media.
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube undoubtedly stand firmly on the podium as the most popular social media sites; however, the journey has not been so successful for all social media platforms. Throughout the last decade our screens have witnessed the rise and fall of a fair share of social networking sites. To name a few – MSN, BBM, Kik, Tumblr, and Vine, each of which has their own modern-day counterpart. BBM, MSN, and Kik were messaging apps much like Whatsapp and Snapchat. Tumblr is a creative space like Pinterest where the user can build a multimedia short-form blog, and Vine was a video host similar to TikTok.
MSN Messenger was a cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Microsoft. This was what we used to contact friends before the days of smart phones. I remember arguing with my sister daily over who was going to use our single desktop computer to log into their MSN account that evening. Those tech-savvy enough to own webcams could video chat and replace their avatar profile photo with one of themselves. MSN shut down in October 2014 after fifteen years of popularity.
Upgrading from an LG Cookie to a Blackberry meant a golden ticket to Blackberry Messenger (BBM), an instant messenger and videotelephony application included exclusively on Blackberry smartphones. Remember when ‘what’s your BBM pin?’ was the ultimate pickup line and ‘pinging’ back to your crush’s broadcast message was the ultimate gateway to a conversation with them? You would invite your friends to ‘PING!! for a rate xoxo’ and brutally rate their looks out of ten – it is perhaps no wonder so many people suffer from body dysmorphia, after being told by ‘friends’ that they are a 6/10 on BBM.
Blackberry stopped designing their own phones in 2016, so the physical keyboards were exchanged for an Apple iPod touch or iPhone. This was when Kik came along; another messenger app where group chats were born to plan sleepovers and outings down the park. Kik once boasted more than 80 million users but was shut down in 2019 after a long period of inactivity.
The most memorable feature of these messenger applications is the repetitive conversations that you felt obliged to have if you and your friend appeared online at the same time. They went a little like this and quickly came to a dead end:
Hey.
Hello.
U okay?
Yeh, you?
Yeah
Wuu2?
Nm u?
Nothing much either.
Today’s teenagers are unlikely to experience the satisfaction of creating a Tumblr profile, filled with palm trees against pastel sunsets, picture perfect skater couples, flower fields, idyllic bedrooms, and cute #ootd, on a desktop computer. Instead, the world has become Apple and Android-infested, preoccupied with Snapchat best friend lists, Instagram filters, stories, and Twitter threads. The world of social media is constantly updating. It is evolving into a more addictive drug by the day – making it all too easy to forget where it all began.
Eve Davies
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