Skype vs IM

My mother made her first Skype phone call last week to her friend in Argentina, and called me to chat about the experience. Similar to other people's first foray into the global web based collaboration environment, she was amazed about how simple it was to use Skype and that it cost her nothing to make phone calls to other countries.

When I told her that instant messaging had been around for years, she quickly dismissed IMing as "not holding a conversation". I was surprised to learn that for her, "conversations" must either take place in person, or over the phone. She also commented that, "I used instance messaging once, and it was very confusing and hard to follow the dialogue". I, of course, can not seem to be bothered with the phone, and would rather IM my contacts vs. picking up any sort of phone.

I think the differences between our view-points on what types of technology can be used to "hold a conversation" clearly reflect the differences between my mother's generation and my own. I suspect one of the reasons is that my parents grew up with only a phone and I grew up with a phone and many flavors of instant messaging. My mother sees Skype as a natural extension of the physical phone, whereas I see Skype as a natural extension of instant messaging.

Another reason, I suspect, is that my parent likes to hold dedicated one-on-one conversations with their contacts, whereas I grew up holding shorter conversations (IMing) with multiple contacts all at once. My mother never understood what I was doing when I was chatting with 5 friends all at the same time, and commented, "How can you hold a conversation with 5 people all at once? Each person would be insulted if they knew you were talking with 4 other people." When I told her that the 5 people were probably talking with other people besides me, she shook her head and walked away totally befuddled.

I think a third reason relates to the emotional side of talking. My mother's use of Skype keeps her conversations more personal since she can still hear the person's voice. With IMing, she feels that it trivializes and dehumanizes the conversations since it does not allow for emotional expression. Perhaps I should introduce her to emoticons, such as :) ;) etc.

I am interested in finding statistics that compare Skype vs IM usage rates among people of my parent's generation. My own imperial evidence would lead me to conclude that the usage rate of Skype would be higher than IMing.