The lost world of MSN Messenger

Despite only being 30, the students at the school at which I work often make me feel old. They love nothing more than testing my knowledge of their Gen-Z slang: no, I don’t know what you mean when you say Romeo is a ‘simp’ or whether Macbeth’s behaviour is ‘sus’. My average 12-year-old student is far better at IT than I am and yet they’ve never seen an iPod before. The other day, a student asked me where txt speak came from, because they didn’t realise that SMS messages had a character limit. And despite their love of Y2K music and fashion, most of my students have never heard of the millennial rite of passage that was MSN Messenger.

My now constantly-connected students will never know the heady, halcyon experience of running home from school to a clunky, chunky family computer and a dodgy, screeching dial-up connection. They will never know the joy of wiling away the evenings chatting to people you have already just spent the whole day with, creating your own emoji and emoticon shortcuts or spamming each other with ‘winks’. They will never know the angst of signing in and out to attract the attention of your crush; the patience of waiting for a single LimeWire song to transfer to a friend; the annoyance of receiving a ‘nudge’ which made your whole screen shake. They will never know the thought that went into updating your status (normally with moody song lyrics or cryptic heartbreak clues) or deciding your first email address, which was often just downright strange, like ‘sexygal93@msn.com’. They will never know the anger of having to log off because your mum needed to use the phone or the risqué rush of someone asking if you could turn on your webcam.

The noughties were a different time with different digital interactions. MSN Messenger had no public posting, no algorithm deciding who read what, no features, filters or monetisation tools. There were no influencers; there was no need to build a personal brand, or gain followers, or worry about who had the most friends or the biggest contact list. There was no sponsored content, pop-ups, tracking, registering, notifications, ads, cookies, bots or any of the other features that are making the internet increasingly unusable. Instead, it was just a simple interface for text-based conversation and it was wildly successful; in 2009, Messenger had 330 million active users each month.

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The service shut down in 2013 and a decade later I feel nostalgic for the simplicity and serendipity of the early online world, but I also feel a sobering awareness that neither I nor my students will ever know again what it is like to ‘log off’. The two most used acronyms on MSN Messenger were BRB (be right back) and G2G (got to go), both of which let your friends know you were stepping away from your computer. Nowadays, there is no stepping away. We are multiply wired, ensnared – for better and for worse – to ubiquitous devices which give us constant updates and instant feedback and endless distractions. There are no more BRBs or G2Gs.

We are so continually ‘logged on’ that Google executive Eric Schmidt opened his commencement address at Boston University by saying, ‘Take one hour a day and turn that thing off.’ Really it is multiple things and the fact that so many of us would find this pathetically modest task so hard shows just how far the internet has crept into every corner of our lives.

I miss the rationed fun that MSN Messenger offered. I also miss how MSN Messenger was about communicating for communicating’s sake. Nowadays, talking online is a means to an end; WhatsApp is used to organise social lives; Twitter/X is about showing off your political credentials; Instagram is a highlights reel of boasting and Snapchat groups are often about social exclusivity. Most people don’t even ‘talk’ on social media anymore: instead people forward TikTok videos or ‘like’ YouTube shorts or react to Instagram stories with emojis rather than words. MSN Messenger, on the other hand, was about the joy of just chatting.

I’m not even sure what I spent hours and hours talking about with my friends – probably The OC, bands where the frontman wore too much eyeliner, favourite boys at school, what concert we should go to and whether we should spend the day in Camden first. It didn’t really matter and most of the time it was probably very banal, but because my time on the computer was limited it all felt strangely precious. My students will never know this; they will never know what it’s like to disconnect without feeling like you are missing out on something. They will never know what it’s like to have someone ask you, ‘Are you going to be online tonight?’ – a question I was once asked all the time and a question I will never be asked again.