Downsides to Intrafamily IM?

Frisky070802 writes "The NY Times has run a column on how many families now use instant messaging within a household, for instance to ask what someone wants for dinner. This is especially popular as whole houses get wired (or wireless) and computers are scattered throughout the house. This is the case at my house but I tend to be the only one who stays on AIM reliably. Can Slashdotters offer some personal experience, pro/con, with being instantly and constantly accessible to one's spouse and children? Does this tend to break down your 'personal time'?"

Cons?

[CeleronXL]

Everyone in my family uses AIM to communicate around the house. There aren't really any cons to it aside from the fact that it tends to make you lazier and you lose the exercise of having to get up and walk to the person you want to talk to.

Try talking to your family...

[zoobaby]

This is ridiculous. Just physically walk into the room they are in and ask them "What do you want for dinner?" Are people becoming so lazy and scared of others (including family) that they can only communicate via IM, cell phones, email...ect.

Trust me the small walk from room to room, will not affect your pear like body shape.

way to whore it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't slashdot use the google partner link? Oh, I don't know, maybe because slashdot is not google?

KARMA WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't people post this crap AC?

Why can't people just do this by default? It took me 2 seconds Yeah, and it took me a similar time to register with NYTimes, we are using their service for free after all. And now I have a registration I can log into their website automatically without having to read through comments or looking at google, which saves me even more time

FREAK

Ha ha ha

[be-fan]

I'm AIM'ing my brother right now from my laptop. Its actually really nice, since if you see a cool website, you can just send a link, instead of running upstairs and showing it to him on his computer.

What IM is really useful for, however, is keeping in touch with people long-distance. IM has a relaxed, conversational quality that you can't get from a phone call. With the phone, there is pressure to finish the call quickly, and it is something that you do on special occasions. With IM, you can just say hi, or share a random funny thought, without wasting anyone's time.

Re:Try talking to your family...

[irokitt]

Hell, screw what they *want* for dinner, make something and put it on the table. Problem solved, my work is done here.

Your home is a cubicle cluster

[fleener]

The family household is first, and foremost, the place you learn and strengthen your communication skills. I'm sure 10 years from now we'll know all the CONs of diverting most of our face-to-face communication to instant messaging. It will surely strain all form of communication, from retail customer service to inter-office discussions. We already bitch about working in cubicles. Now we want to make our childrens' rooms cubicles too? How utterly sad.

Real people!

[BlndBoy]

Ok, enough is enough. I can't believe there are professionals in this world that think this is a GOOD thing. I regularly stop IM conversations with a phrase like - "Shouldn't this be a phone/face-to-face conversation?" The text medium simply leaves too much room for misunderstanding.

Families need to learn to DEAL with eachother, and having your body language and voice inflection sheilded sure as hell isn't going to help.

Kids these days. (I'm 22, and I get scared.)

Re:instant messangers

[jrockway]

I add/remove program'd MSN messenger on windows and now windows won't boot :)

to everyone saying "just yell ..."

[Pfhreakaz0id]

you obviously don't have a baby. when you are in bed with sleeping baby next to you on the wireless laptop and wife is working in the home office, IM is a godsend.

screaming=kid wakes up = your 20 minutes of private time today is over!

No Downfalls??

[ticklemeozmo]

I've just been reading the past 30+ comments, and no one seems to think that this is a problem!!

Sure, for the teen geeks out there who like a lil privacy (I don't mean like thaT.. well, maybe I guess I do) this is OK for. But for a family to be a family this sure does pose major problems?

A poster a few messages up claimed his wife and him have nothing to talk about when they get home after talking all day. What about for the parent and child who would rather IM while around the house. Doesn't prolonged exposure to this make the child more unwilling to talk to his/her parent face-to-face about sex/drugs/abuse??

I know I tried my damnedest to remain an reclusive troll around my house, but thankfully my parents were active in my life and always asked questions. Hindsight being what it is, I'm glad we came to a good balance between privacy and parenting! That sort of thing requires you to LOOK at your parents and FACE your problems/fears.. not hitting "Block" or "Exit".

I know I have a point here, and I'm trying to find it.

Sometimes this is the only way.

[ByteHog]

For example: me, my brother, my mom and my dad all live in different cities. We keep in touch via IM.

Re:Personal time between spouses

[Selecter]

Maybe you should step away from the IM for a bit, and are you sure she feels the same way about it that you do? Women are quite a bit less inclined to want to communicate through a device. They crave one on one personal interaction and I dont think going thru IM counts. Maybe you have a exception there, but I bet she misses curling up on the couch with you and talking about things. When you get home and there's nothing left to talk about, I think it says you're spending too much time connected to each other. Smothering your wife is just as bad as ignoring her, I think. The trick is balancing everything. Why dont you ask her tonight straight up if she misses those days where you would sit down and catch up with each other? Bet she will surprise you.

Re:this is stupid

[elmegil]

Exactly. Using ICQ when I'm upstairs and my wife's downstairs is way better than shouting up/down the stairs. Especially when the baby's sleeping.

Re:this is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered families that live in houses that are so big, you would have to choose between either not communicating at all, or using IM? Or one family member is upstairs, and the other is downstairs? Yeah, there are those intercom things, or you can use a phone (maybe an internal PBX), but IM is great when you already have the infrastructure. I would throw Voice-over-IP into the mix personally.

Also, it is cool to IM between roommates/family because you can send links or copy and paste, etc. Its easier to help someone with their computer using IM, then with verbal communication.

Considering how much time people spend in front of the computer, this is a good thing because it allows them to communicate even if they are glued to the PC.

irony...

[kevin lyda]

so families are using a new communication tool to, um, communicate, and people are asking if this is reducing communication within families?

is im or email or irc or phone or letter or videophone or telegraph the same as talking face to face? no, they're all different. and none are best, certain circumstances lend themselves better to certain methods. some people find letters a better method of telling family members bad news. i like people to email me info like addresses, phone numbers or email addresses. irc is a nice supplement to conference calls as it lets taking minutes be distributed.

but i supposed change always sees this. "oh no, it's different, it must be BAAAAD!"

whatever.

ALL the time!

[zippity8]

Try living in a student house with 8 or so people in it.

Back in the day, we'd end up using IM more frequently than we'd actually go in and talk to each other. Not only was it more convenient, it also let us respond after studying, when we got home, or whatever. With the schedules so different, it was just easier than getting up, banging on the door, then going back and messaging them later on.

But then again, the best way to get each other's attention was to crank up Quake....

Home, no - work, yes

[Cat_Byte]

I worked at a .com during the boom and the entire company had ICQ installed. It was SO much better than playing phone tag. Hell if someone was on the phone you could pop-up msg them saying who was on the line wanting to talk to them. Or if I was on the phone I could still keep taking care of business via ICQ.
For the home I think it's just silly or at the least, lazy. The only time I've ever used it room to room in the home was joking around. "It's 10pm. Do youk now what your son is doing behind your back?"

Re:Non-Indentured Servitude link

[Frisky070802]

Why can't people just do this by default?

I didn't refer to the google cache of the article because the google cache isn't intended to bypass site registration policies.

Why can't people register, for free, without complaining?

Damn!

[vrioux]

Whoa, I wonder what it's gonna be in a few years... Instead of your citizen ID, your primary identification record will be your Microsoft Passport? Damn... I don't understand people. Do you like virtual sunsets or do you prefer being there. I am a network admin but the thing I cherish most in my life is nature itself. I do use IMs at work to answer short questions from collegues, but at home, I talk with my wife and children. We play games, we take a walk, we cook dinner together, we go on a car ride somewhere we never went, we dance to music, we wash the dog.. Damn what's boring you so much people? Have you seen it all already? I don't. Shssh...

This isn't a healthy tendency...

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans NEED other Humans in their environment, or else they may go insane. IM is no substitute for actually seeing (as in the physical world) of another person.

Re:No Downfalls??

[Slack3r78]

To be honest, if a kid's not willing to talk to his parents, that's not going to change much - better or worse because of IM. It's purely anecdotal, but speaking for myself, I know that I don't exactly have the best relationship with either of my parents and that IM wouldn't have changed that one way or another. I simply have no desire to really talk to them, IM or otherwise - it comes down to a matter of personality more so than it does medium.

On the other hand, I'd say it's had a positive impact in other areas of my life. I do 'speak' with my siblings more than I would if simply left to my own devices, and keeping in touch with friends that are gone and in college elsewhere has made IM worth it for that alone. Instead of being forced to simply part with old friendships and move on, holding on only to one or two deemed 'important enough,' I've stayed in touch with most of my friends from high school. IE: They didn't just suddenly drop out of my life. I think this is really the greatest impact IM is going to have on the younger generation, such as myself, that's coming up now. I'd suspect that 10 years from now you'll have fewer cases of best friends who haven't talked in years simply because they lost touch - communication is becoming too easy now. Personally, I see that as a good thing.

Re:Back to back!

[LinuxHam]

You have another replier with a good point. I get a bunch of free inbound text messages but don't pay for 2-way messaging. I pay $5 for unlimited AIM. Plus, as the other replier said, she's always at home and would to run downstairs and fish through her purse to find her cellphone.

This way, I don't have to teach her how to read and reply to SMS messages, too :) It took long enough to get her to skillfully use Gaim. In fact, we're in the midst of another "she lost her cellphone somewhere in the house" incident, so SMS would *really* be out of the question!

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't you be sleeping with your wife instead of playing video games? I know I have.

IM to SMS

[dethkultur]

I use this all the time with my girlfriend... MSN, AIM, and YIM all have SMS gateways to their IM networks. Personally, I like MSNs the best (doesn't require a seperate sign in from SMS if you tie it to your regular IM account.)

Lots of pros, pretty much combines the pros of IM (instant, and already integrated with your buddy list) with SMS (can get it anywhere). No cons yet though I can see plenty if your SO is the kind that uses it as a new anger communication channel.

The meal coordination stories are classics of course... I know a guy that used this [duncanlamb.com] to make a quick IM bot for his office, listing all local menus and allowing eeveryone in his office to vote for what they wanted to eat that day. Cool stuff. (yes, I am the author of the project)

Re:Non-Indentured Servitude link

[fastidious edward]

Then don't read the article.

Re:Heh

[rockmanac]

Both Freshman and Sophomore years, my roomate listened to different music than I did, so we'd use headphones. AIM was essential, if he needed to ask me something without getting up 'cause I had the noise canceling kind (some really, really nice Sony ones that I use for doing my shift at Marquette Radio).

-A

The Killer App ... a Buddy List

[Googol]

I asked my daughter why she preferred IM to the old teenage standby -- hours on the phone. The answer surprised me. She could see who was online.

From her perspective it solved two problems

1. You knew in advance who was available to talk (lowered chance of rejection).

2. It avoided the unpleasant experience of having to mediate access through a parent ("he's not in", "he can't come to the phone", "he's been grounded and can't talk"). This is actually a variant of #1.

So it's all about saving face and managing rejection. IM provides lots of strategies and aids to do just that.

Given that it solves or mitigates two teenage problems (potential rejection by absence or parent, and parental control), I predict the first cellphone company to implement a usable buddy list wins.

Re:Another stray from family time

[Slack3r78]

Perhaps it's just me, or maybe 'the breakdown of society' as a whole, but I think most younger people are beggining to view the family unit in the tradional sense as less and less important. I don't argue that familial life is important for a person's development, especially early in life, but that perhaps the idea of a central 'family above all else' mentallity is becoming somewhat less central in the minds of younger people?

We're fed this image of a 1950-60's Leave It To Beaver family, but honestly, that image of perfection has only been a reality in a minority of cases, even then. Given the fact that as the years have gone by, Americans have seemed more willing to shed the old way of doing things, I can't say I'm surprised that the old idea of what family is would be one of them.

Speaking totally from personal experience, almost none of my friends have anything approaching a 50's model family. I've noticed that among most of the people I've grown up with, the emphasis tends to be on extra-familial bonds instead of the tradiontal, genetic family, and this is in the south - the bastion of traditional values. Is this a growing trend, or just a fluke of my hometown?

(Note on hometown comment: I live in a city of approximately 200,000 people which also happens to sit right next to the largest military post in the world, so it is entirely possible that this is just weirdness in my town due to the constant movement of people in and out with the military, even though myself and my circle of friends do not come from military families. End rambling. :-P)

changes the nature of things

[gotw]

It's a funny thing. It seems a little easier to be frank with someone, or ask a hard question over IM. Maybe it's because you can't see the other parties face. Whether the impact is positive or negative I don't know, having a blazing row with someone because of that frankness is not nessecarily bad, getting it out in the open to be dealt with rather than letting issues simmer for ages.
Inter household IM could have a really big effect on the way families communicate.

more communication, not less

[mrv]

My husband and I often work long or odd hours, or other committments will have us coming and going, but we usually have access to a computer while at work, besides what we have at home.

It's very easy to chat about the day (vent frustrations, really, or the question of what's for dinner and who's picking it up, etc.) while it is happening or we have a free moment. There are days that if we see each other, one of us might be sleeping, so we may not get to chat at home for a few days in a row, but through email and IM we can still communicate ("don't wait up for me" - "dinner is on your own", etc.)

If it weren't for IM, I'd fear that we wouldn't get to talk very often or know what's going on in each other's lives. But since we're usually both wired, we can still communicate even when we're not in the same physical place.

Re:Ha ha ha

[Radish03]

What IM is really useful for, however, is keeping in touch with people long-distance. IM has a relaxed, conversational quality that you can't get from a phone call. With the phone, there is pressure to finish the call quickly, and it is something that you do on special occasions. With IM, you can just say hi, or share a random funny thought, without wasting anyone's time.

While I do agree with you about the phone, I've found that while away at college IM has become a sort of annoyance. It pretty much allows my parrents to keep tabs on me all the time. If I'm still up at 3 am and one of them happens online, "What are you doing up so late!?!" If I'm idle for a day because I spent the night at the girlfriend's place, "Where were you all day??? Did you really sleep in til 4pm?"

Re:Non-Indentured Servitude link

[gangien]

Because we DON'T FUCKING WANT THE FUCKING NEW-YORK TIMES TO FUCKING KNOW WE READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE.

THEN DON'T READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE Seriously, you want your cake and to eat it. Tough beans, you're using their resources they have every right to do what they're doing. But of course complain because people are spying on you or whatever.

Uh, because we're such a web-enabled family

[soloport]

My spouse and I share an office. We sit across from each other. We can each look to the left of our monitors and see the other's face -- no yelling required (especially after putting the Athlon with jet-engine-like fan in the next room; door shut).

We still IM each other, every day. Why? Because we read a lot of web information and it's just so convenient to post a link to the other about our findings.

Or when a family member IMs one of us, it's easy to just copy the Jabber log out of gaim and paste it into the other's message window and share a conversation.

Or when a client IMs one of us, we can let the other in on the question or panic-stricken demand for help and colaborate on a course of action.

That's why!

Speeding to an eventual linguistic heat death.....

[1iar_parad0x]

The only problem I see with this sudden increase in instant communication is the eventual rise of linguistic entropy. Have you ever read an old collection of letters? I remember being impressed at some of the letters foot soldiers in the Civil War wrote to their families. Even moderately educated people seemed to write very well. I'm sure I sound like an old fogey, and that's okay. I also understand that language is an evolving thing. However, I think we are slowly degrading our language much in the same way instant mass media has eroded our art.

Re:this is stupid

[Bishop]

Wow. What excellent grammar and business form you have. I see four one sentence paragraphs, and two run on sentences. I will ignore the parenthesis. Keep up the good work.

Re:Uh, because we're such a web-enabled family

[Anonymous Coward]

I pity the world if you become the norm. How pathetically sad.

Re:this is stupid

[smacktits]

I always try to use proper grammar and spelling, whether it be on IRC, IM or anywhere else. To see people giving it the usual "lol omg wtf !!11!1!1!" or "n e 1 no how 2 do sumfin" makes me cringe. English is your mother tongue. Nurture it, don't assrape it.

Re:How big is your house?

[rifter]

Is it so big that you can't just call out or walk for 10-15 seconds to talk to somebody? I've used IM clients to have a silent conversation in a crowded room before but not for regular communication at home.

I had no idea what fucking luddites you slashdotters are. Do you have any idea what technology is for at all? The point is if I am working upstairs it is damned inefficient to walk all the way downstairs, stop waht I am doing, interrupt someone else, and stop what they are doing, just so I can ask them a one sentence question. It is stupid and unnecessary thanks to technology.

We are not talking about ending family communication. That happened decades ago. We are talking about making it possible again. Families are busy, dispersed, and engaged in all sorts of distracting tasks. There are few chances for familial communication especially with the death first of nightly gatherings for reading and prayer and second with the death of the family dinner.

I am not saying an effort to revive such practices is misguided, but what if you could talk to your family while doing other things? That is what instant messaging was invented for. It is there so you can talk to multiple people at once while coding, posting to slashdot, writing the great american novel, doing your homework, balancing the budget, or whatever it is you are doing on your computer. It means you can talk to the rest of the family and ask simple questions and make decisions together.

Now that the rest of the family have computers, pdas, cell phones and such it is especially spiffy because you can text message and talk to your kids and family members to keep tabs on what they are doing and coordinate that family dinner that died so long ago for lack of coordination and communication.

Also, the internet and instant messaging are great for people who do not live with their families. I communicate with the wired members of my family much more often simply because they are available to me. If you are back in the 19th century sending paper letters through snail mail you get much less communication.

Re:this is stupid

[NanoGator]

"What ever happened to just screaming/yelling down a hallway?"

Hey dad!! DAAAAAAAAD! Go to ay ess kay dot ess el ay ess H (I don't know how to spell H) dee oh tee dot oh ar gee slash see oh em em ee eh tee ess dot pee el question mark es eye dee equals 91426 and symbol see eye dee equals 7867909... that comment was really funny! What? Emai? Okay.

Re:this is stupid

[fleener]

Yeah, face-to-face communication has nothing to do with raising kids! What planet are you from?

Helpful in hostile situations

[PhotoGuy]

Surprised that no one has mentioned this

In the case of a high conflict divorce with children involved, IM'ing can be a relatively low conflict way, for the children to keep in touch with the parent they're not currently with at a given time. (In many cases, the children feel on the spot if they're on the phone with one parent while within earshot of the other.)