Yes, they set themselves to always be away, and I’m not being totally accurate when I say that they’re only on 9-5. Basically these folks are logged on when they’re logged in and using their laptops, which is more like 9am to 9pm.

I, on the other hand, am logged in 24/7. I think the conflict is that they still have a paradigm of immediacy. Their clients flash and bounce and do other visually stimulating things to let them know they have a message. Mine just sits there. I have to be looking for new messages to see them.

For me to focus and not be distracted by chat, all I have to do is not switch to that screen window. For them it’s… more difficult somehow?

GMail already puts your chat logs into the history with your email correspondence. It’s strangely comforting to have all that in the same place and available via search – nonwithstanding the creepy factor of seeing all your ‘instant’ communication saved forever. That’s those norms again – they aren’t shifting fast enough to prevent the creepy from being there.

Perhaps there’s something here – we demarcate the stuff that was interesting/personal (bookmarks, email to us, chat logs, phone calls, our photos, videos) and save it slightly differently than ‘everything we’ve ever seen’ – but all of it is searchable later.

How long we looking at for that. 10 years? 15?

First might be that IM is losing immediacy/synchrony – since we know that we’re going to be continually copresent with our buddies, we can get back to them on our schedule. This is a little different from a few years ago where a buddy might only sign on for a short amount of time to IM us.

Second is that we’re treating IM more like email. Its a way we know we can leave a message for you on your desktop when you return. Seeing as everyone has 30 email addresses and Facebook and etc IM still remains a method of somewhat reliable, direct communication.

While some of the problems danah describes still exist, I believe that more of us are internalizing these new, casual uses of IM. Its almost like IM has shifted from the “full-synchrony” (i.e. cell phone conversation-like) to the partial-synchrony norms of text messaging. Which is sort of interesting because IM have always been text messages.

Do they mark themselves as “Away”? It seems that’s where the culture clash exists.

IRC participation/involvement is its own beast. I think that IM/chat have definitely taken over the mindshare that was owned by IRC for a while – but you must admit, IRC is *not* mainstream by any stretch of the imagination. If/when I show people that I’m connected and sitting in a “room” with people from all over the world – they’re amazed and a little creeped out. It doesn’t usually affect their opinion much when I point out that their AIM or GTalk app is doing the same thing. “But those are my friends”. Apparently that makes all the difference…

I’m in this group. I use irssi (a curses-based IRC chat client) with
bitlbee (a gateway server to AIM/oscar, jabber, etc.) to do all my
chat. I leave irssi running inside a screen session so that whenever I
have ssh and a terminal emulator available I have chat. Since my mail
client is mutt (also curses-based), I leave it in the same screen
session. If I’m looking at email, I’m three keystrokes away from my
chat client.

This doesn’t quite jive with everybody else in the office, in part
because of an antagonism towards IRC, but also in part because I think
that several key figures are in this camp:

# work-related Usually-On’s (9-5)

They use Adium, guard access to their nicks, and use chat for (a)
things that aren’t appropriate to say aloud, (b) talking without being
overheard, or (c) pasting long URLs quickly.

It confuses me a bit, since we all work essentially in the same
capacity: sysadmin and helpdesk. Suggestions on how to ameliorate the
culture clash would be most welcome.