I do some of my best writing in GChat. It’s my most used method of communicating. I have a smartphone so I can GChat from it, making phone calls is secondary. I tell funny stories on GChat, play therapist, vent, gossip, and talk to friends who are miles away, but mostly I use it as a tool of procrastination and distraction. Caroline Bankoff of Thought Catalog turned her GChat habit into an essay about her GChat history (via The Hairpin):
“4. I started GChatting on March 6th, 2007, and as of this writing, I have 9940 chats in my records. If you have an idea for how I should commemorate my 10,000th chat – I estimate it will take place sometime late next week – you should let me know.”
“14. Results returned by searching my GChat records for the phrases “good name for a band,” “good band name,” “what I should call my band,” “what we should call our band,” “what I will call my band,” and “what we will call our band”: Philistine Collusion, Tits on a Stick, Better Yet, The NuvaRing, Reptar, The Candy (Ass) (W)Rappers, Joe Wilson’s Outburst, Black Market Fats, White Women in Peril, Shame Spiral.”
I started GChatting on February 4, 2007. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was the first person I chatted with. He wrote, “First off, how are you between the hips?” I should’ve taken that first chat off record. I have 6,399 chats in my records and looking back through those chats proved to be a bit depressing. I am not as mature as I think I am; the word “poop” beat out the words “write” and “Obama” combined.
The bright side of my GChat research is that I have found some ways that Gchat could be useful for writers; we could steal some chat dialogue for characters, recall conversation for memoirs, or create found poetry. There’s got to be a reason the folks at Google have allowed us to save every single chat.
So, GChat users, how many chats do you have in your records? What are some of your most (shameful) used words?
6 responses
The good: hilarious late night convos with your friends. The bad: being threatened by said friends when you don’t respond to their chats. The ugly: old flame convos. that last bit, I could do without, but I laughed so hard going through my chat history. I have nowhere near that many, only 221. That could be because I stay invisible most of the time!
Eek! I have 6437 myself. I too excel at chatting – this number doesn’t even count my AOL or MSN IM conversations.
Not sure I could tell you what the most shameful words from chat were, but some day if I ever have the guts it would be interesting to go through and examine the rise and fall of a couple of really intense relationships I had in terms of how they played out in chat conversations. Hmmm, this is giving me ideas…
Although I agree these histories are a great source for dialogue, I can’t bring myself to save them any more than I would tape my daily interactions with friends. The tool itself has become so common that it seems like spying to tape my own “chats.” That being said, maybe I just don’t want a record of how very naughty I’ve been.
This luddite wants to know how you view your old chats. I can’t figure it out.
Seth, when you’re in your Gmail, there’s a menu on the lefthand side with all of your folders/tags. If you’re like me and have a lot of folders, you can click on more and it will bring up the rest of the options including your starred mail and chats! Click on chats and let the games begin 🙂
Aha! I guess I chose not to save them sometime long ago. Oh well …
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