Friend: are you busy after 8 tonight?

Me: I can’t do it today
I’m like doing some stuff
And by that I mean reading and sleeping

Friend: HAHAHAH it’ll just take like 45 min I can meet you in fishbowl even
plzzzzzzzzzzzzz
we need to get this taken care of

Me: Sleep is a thing humans have to do once every four days
I’m due for my sleep

Let’s talk about how we talk.

Or, rather, how we “chat” here at the University, an environment where things are easily pushed to the periphery — class melds with work which melds with the party you attended last weekend in a series of conversational tidbits.

How do you gather the pieces, strike a balance? Maybe it’s right there, in the same place you go while procrastinating on that paper, surfing the web in lecture or killing time at work: Gchat.

Constantly plugged in

You sign in to Gmail to check an e-mail from a professor. All of a sudden, your friend sends you a message:

Friend: I MISS YOU!

Just like that, you’ve inserted yourself into the Angell Hall of the Internet, the green dot next to your name in the lower left corner of your Gchat page signaling your availability to speak. You’ve opened yourself up to conversation.

Me: I MISS YOU TOO
sorry i couldn’t go to detroit this weekend
i heard you saw emily

Friend: no worries!
come another time!!
yeah she came saturday

Me: i want to see you!

Friend: Back at ya!!

At times, it feels like half our lives are spent sending e-mails for classes, for jobs or for internships. Gchat prolongs that correspondence into an endless stream of conversation, supplying the potential to talk to whomever, whenever, about whatever.

Most of the conversations are unremarkable — throwaway. They’re about what you want to eat for dinner and why you still haven’t started that Anthro paper.

But Gchatting also provides the arena for intimacy, a place where one’s deepest revelations of love and loss are exposed in the comfort of one’s own home.

“You can Gchat in bed,” Elizabeth Gumport, a senior editor of the literary magazine n+1, said.

Friend: Hey how was your date last week?

Me: Um it was okay

Friend: Just okay?

Me: The conversation was kind of one sided.
Not a lot of chemistry
But who knows really?
It’s probably too early to tell

Gchat fosters new relationships and sustains existing ones. University alum Jeffrey Domsic did not talk to his long-distance girlfriend from Denver on the phone. He chatted with her instead. For the three years he was in Ann Arbor up until his graduation from the University last year, the burden of never seeing her was eased by Google Chat.

“Without social media, I don’t think (the relationship) would have worked,” Domsic said. “Without being able to stay in touch as much as social media allows us to, it wouldn’t work. We don’t have the personalities to be able to handle it.”

The “salon”

In her article “Chathexis,” which was published in n+1 last August, Gumport likens Gchat to a 21st century French salon – traditionally comfortable, informal gatherings of intellectuals during the Enlightenment.

“The best Gchat conversations take place, like those of the salon, with one or both participants in repose, stretched out on a couch or in bed. Tucked beneath our covers, laptops propped on our knees — is this not the posture most conducive to meaningful Gchatting?” Gumport writes in the article.

In an interview, Gumport described Gchat as a means to bring people together online in a way that’s reminiscent of more personal relationships.

On Gchat, the conversations are one-on-one. They are leisurely. No one wears a title, just a name. The participants are on an equal playing field.

“There’s this sense of equality and possibility to me that seems kind of unique,” Gumport said.

And late at night, Gchat returns philosophy to the bedroom — the pallid glow of the laptop screen becoming romantic and mysterious.

“Which perhaps is why so many of us feel our best selves in Gchat,” Gumport writes. “Silent, we are unable to talk over our friends, and so we become better and deeper listeners, as well as better speakers — or writers … We have time to express ourselves precisely, without breaking the rhythm.”

Hoarding the past

We can return to these conversations, the evidence of the day you were craving Thai food archived in a neat tab on your browser.

Gumport’s second idea is the theory of Gchat as a secretaire, a locked 17th century writing desk used by women to store letters. The secretaires served as private repositories of correspondence, proof that the dialogues between individuals existed.