The office seemed almost eerily quiet and untroubled, a room full of stylish people wearing headphones and instant-messaging one another.
In the last few years, we even started instant messaging one another during meetings, like eighth graders whispering in class: "Did he just say —— " or "Does she realize that ——." Sometimes, people would even wisecrack over I.M., to see if they could make other people in the room laugh.
Ms. Borsecnik said that one of the ways AOL advertises to teenagers is by providing programming and advertising at times of the day when teenagers are most likely to be instant-messaging one another.
Digikids are used to instant messages: one-to-one SMSes; one-to-network status message, one-to-the-universe microblog updates.
Researchers from the Central Connecticut State University tested the effects of instant messaging on reading comprehension; one group of students read and responded to instant messages (IMs) while reading an online textbook, another received an IM before reading, but not during, and the third group read the textbook without interruption.
Friends were already sending instant messages to one another.
People who want to try SearchTogether must first sign up for Microsoft's free Windows Live ID program, which lets them chat online or send instant messages to one another.
More and more students are sending instant messages to one another (chatting and note-passing, 21st century-style), day trading (as opposed to daydreaming) and even starting their own companies, all in class.
During these spans of time spent in front of the computer, they may at any given point be coding software, corresponding with Internet theorists and venture capitalists or just firing off instant messages to one another that say, "Shut up".
The longest lines of the whole festival seemed to be for a kiosk where cellphones could be dropped off for a free recharge, and they were full of girls who had been furiously sending instant messages to one another until their batteries ran out.
Although "Romeo and Juliet" is now treated as teen-centric (this book reprints Roz Chast's hilarious New Yorker cartoon charting Romeo and Juliet's instant messages to one another: "xoxoxo bye see u tmw"), it can confer youth as well as convey it.
