All you possessed was a nickname, which you could change on a whim simply by typing /nick. I guess the reason why it was easy making friends was because no one could judge you. I made friends with a couple of Aussies, as well as a few local friends who became my good friends for a period of time. In those days, hashes were used to represent channels, not the ubiquitous hashtags you see today.

I remember finding my way to #chatzone and #wild_chat on the AustNet server, and of course, #kidscentral. When I was barely nine, a friend introduced me to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in the form of the massively popular mIRC software. Your WhatsApp and your Facebook account is tied to your phone number and your real identity.

However, it is with this convenience that we lost anonymity. Now, before and during my yearly In-Camp Trainings, we’ll simply drop a WhatsApp message. When I was a clerk for the second half of my National Service five years ago, I used to have to send mass SMSes every now and then just to disseminate a message, and to reply everyone individually where required. Group projects no longer require everyone to be online on MSN Messenger at a stipulated time–just leave a message on WhatsApp and the rest will receive in due time. Now my phone can do the same thing, and more. The computer, meanwhile, allowed us to set up group chats, send photos and videos, emoticons and dole out message after message with abandon. It used to be that our phones were a last resort–like if we were on the outside and had no other means of communication–after all, richer forms of communication just weren’t that feasible with a 160 character limit, a nine digit keypad and five cents per SMS (if you exceeded the paltry 500 SMS limit). It’ll be a chore typing long messages with this… I remember back then, the follow-up question to “what’s your number?” would be “what’s your MSN?” My old Sony Ericsson K508i. Yet, if you were to look back some eight or ten years ago, the computer used to be the communications hub in our lives. After all, it was designed primarily to be a telecommunications device.

I think the mobile phone is the natural end-game for where such apps reside. What’s your primary tool of communication nowadays? For me, and I guess for many of you, that would be WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or one of the many other chat apps available on the your mobile phone.

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