Very funny but true, the object of this post came up in a discussion yesterday with a friend of mine (who wishes to remain nameless) and after a little research i realized how many people are afflicted with this…problem. During the very heated discussion, a joke was cracked and my friend began to laugh uncontrollably and the after a few seconds, without notice, silence fell and she said to me “you know, i am here laughing and all that’s going through my head is ‘lol’ and ‘dwl'”. I thought about what she had just said and i realized what she meant, she is thinking ‘lol’ and ‘dwl’ and what comes out is laughter. Now i didn’t laugh at this, quite the contrary i actually related, doing it an not realizing, sometimes i will be thinking the internet lingo/jargon and out comes the actual version.

I have coined the term messenger syndrome (MS) to explain what happens, basically prolonged usage of internet applications such as messenger (messenger live and yahoo messenger) causes the disease MS displaying symptoms such as ILC (internet jargon cohesion) that is, you associate internet jargon subconsciously and express them physically, in other words you think them then do.

So if you’re laughing and all that comes to mind is lol, dwl and lmao, you’ve got MS. If what you type online to express an emotion (example typing ‘sigh’/sad) happens to be the first thing that comes out of your mouth to express that feeling instead of doing it, then you’ve got MS. And worse if the emoticons you have for every emotion or action you wish to share online keeps popping up in your head in real face to face contact, especially when that emoticon is related to the action or emotion you are feeling at the time then got a serious problem.

Other symptoms of the disease is typing/writing short handed when you shouldn’t examples of these are:

• Typing ‘u’, ‘r’, ‘mayb’, ‘ttyl’ and a wide range of other abbreviation in an exam, for a paper or for business related matters.

You may not even realize that you are doing this until the spell check kicks in. In the case of handwritten work it will probably go unnoticed until its too late.

The only known cure is to stop using messenger and go back to the traditional way of communicating (ie face to face or over the phone). Anywayz im running a bit late, got a meeting…ttyl