MSN

MSN



12/01/2009



The culmination of almost two million years of human learning, mental growth, spiritual improving and soul-searching, accessible to all mankind, appears to us in the form of MSN.

Most users of this brilliant service – free of charge – are oblivious as to what the M stands for, what the S stands for, and there are only a handful of people, an elite band of martially-trained monks who dwell in the farthest corners of the Himalayan Mountains, who know what the fuck N stands for. All most of us – myself included – know about MSN is that it is simple, quick, and you get to customise it (mildly) by colouring and shaping your own font.

Children and adolescents from the ages of 9 till 20-something are infatuated with MSN; a night not spent sat before the glowingly bright computer/laptop/mobile-phone screen, clacking away at the keyboard, virtually chatting away with their cross-continental chums is a night wasted. Most teenagers rarely ever feel the crisp waft of winter-air whisk their hair, or the warmth of the summer sun as it beats down upon them: most of us experience the moon only ever through a window, and it’s unchanging façade is nothing compared to the nearly-always receiving-a-new-message face of MSN.

Perhaps this overview of the topic is puzzling – just why, I hear you breathe, is MSN such a turn-on for its audience; could their online conversations really beat actual human confrontation with such ease? An MSN conversation will almost certainly begin, as anyone can tell you, with the words –

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Hay wot up???”

“Hey lol!!!! WDC?”

This almost immediately is followed by a less enthusiastic:

“Sup”, and the conversation deteriorates from there.



L(augh) O(ut) L(oud) is a commonly employed term on MSN. It is perhaps, the internet’s most used phrase. Not only does it add a certain affection to the (almost always entirely unfunny) prior observation, but it also builds a bridge between the “loler” (the person doing the LOLing in the first place) and the recipient of the typed LOL. All over the internet, from Youtube.com to PenIsland.com, from Google to Wikipedia, from AskJeeves to paedophilic websites of soulless cruelty, LOL is regarded – by all humans, all over the globe – as the best, most perfectly vague – virtual invention. It is almost as brilliant and internationally adored as “fuck” but that’s a different rant.•

“Sup” is not as common, but is employed by teenagers frequently. “What is up?” shortened to “What’s up?” When “What” was removed, we were left with Sup, and that is where that came from. It can often be confused, with lightly laughable consequences with “Soup” and therefore can prove infinitely confusing for anyone who is stupid.

MSN hosts people from all over the world. Anyone with a computer, anywhere, can sign up. For free! You’d imagine then, that anyone on MSN would feel nothing but interest at the scope of conversation anyone can be having with anyone, but this is not so. Oftentimes, people join MSN because they want to relieve themselves of boredom; they therefore constantly complain that they are “Bored.” MSN has never seen a sentence in more circulation than “Nuthin Much. I’m bored as Fuck.” The fuck will most usually be replaced by two stick-figures humping one another, or a small yellow face winking as it mounts a sheep, the floating exclamation “WTF!” above their vibrating virtual bodies.

I cannot express to you the contempt I hold for most of my “friends” on MSN. People I added from group conversations for the mere purpose of raising my contact-count on the bloody thing – to have less than a hundred contacts makes you a “loner”; to have less than fifty makes you a freak. These people won’t talk to me, nor I to them. It’s sad that our lives are spent together – us contacts, all “ONLINE” but never talking. Never talking deeply, truthfully. It’s all just meaningless, bored, unmotivated, tired tripe. Full of meaningless letters and personal messages with grammatical mistakes – often lyrics sucked randomly out of song the sucker is listening to at that precise moment – with BRB punctuating a lot of sentences, many small smiley faces displaying more emotion than their sender could muster in a million years, so dulled is his face from countless hours whittled away watching the glowing, trite, meaningless, depressing, tiny boxes on his screen pop up with new, ugly and fashionable comments from people he hardly knows, or knows to well and cannot bear to think of them. It’s all just a great jumbled jungle of boredom, and I speak for the whole teenage community – since most of us are too bleak to realise it ourselves – when I say,

“GTG.”