With busy college schedules, partying, studying and going to football games, college students find it hard to keep in touch with family and friends. It may be their friends that live in town or it may be friends and family that live across the country. More and more college students are turning to instant messaging services offered by their Internet Service Providers (ISP) as an easy way to stay in touch with friends and family no matter where they live.
Many college students are finding instant messaging (IM) to be a quick and easy way to stay in contact with everyone. Instant messaging is a great way to save time and to multi-task while chatting with friends and family. While many people use email as a form of staying connected with family and friends, instant messaging has more of an instant gratification than email does. Since instant messaging allows college students to chat in real time there is not a lag time in between responses like there is with email.
This is not to say that email does not serve its purpose any longer because it certainly does. It’s just to say that instant messaging has several advantages that make it a more ideal medium to communicate across the miles.
It’s FREE
My grandmother used to say, “If it’s free it’s for me”, which in some cases left her with a bunch of worthless crap. This, however, is not the case when it comes to instant messaging. There are many ISPs that offer instant messaging for free, whether or not you pay for their online service or not. Using a free instant messaging service is much more cost effective than paying long distance charges on a land line or having to pay for minutes used on your cell phone. So in this instance, if it’s free it should be for you!
Time Saver
Instant messaging goes at a much faster pace than sending email messages. Solving issues or just catching up on the latest family gossip can be resolved right then and there as opposed to having to go back and forth with each other via email. Since a college student can be surfing the net for a research paper and chatting with their mother at the same time, it is a way to kill two birds with one stone. Talk about multi-tasking! Instant messaging is the ideal way to multi-task and still stay in tune with the happenings of friends and family. This is much more time efficient than having to spend two hours chatting it up with friends, family, girlfriends and boyfriends. It’s easy and informal, while still fitting the communication purpose.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Studies have found that people actually find it much easier to be frank and to the point in an email than having to have the same conversation face-to-face. Instant messaging allows you to have ‘uncomfortable conversations’ with people via a faceless medium. Many college students and individuals feel like instant messaging allows them to get closer to their friends and family at a faster rate than other forms of communication, such as email.
Have you ever typed out an email in haste and then slammed the send key before you changed your mind. Did you then feel a cold sweat sweep over you after you realized what you had said in the email was going to upset the recipient? Well, many have, so you are not alone in that boat. The not-so-great part about communicating with email is that there really isn’t any way you can take the email back before the recipient reads it. Also, once it is in writing, it is there for eternity.
With instant messaging, however, it is a bit different. If you end up saying something that you may regret, instant messages are a bit more disposable than emails. Instant message chats are not records that people usually save or keep in their message history. Emails, however, are.
Basically, instant messaging is the closest relative to actual conversation. It allows you to send quick, short and easy messages to friends and family in real time. Instant messaging also gives you the sense that you are having a real conversation with someone, rather than the feeling of writing correspondence that comes along with sending emails.
Aside from instant, Facebook is also a must for students. Visit the link below to learn more about Facebook:
http://www.graduatingfromdebt.com/2014/04/09/facebook-account/
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