QQ Friends

QQ as I mentioned in some past post is a Chines chatting program with more users than there are Americans. My students, and various other people from English corner have been very excited by the fact that I use QQ. But try as I might I just can't stand to spend more than a few hours a week on QQ since I get inundated with conversations from students. It's fine to talk to one or two people while I'm surfing the internet, and useful to talk to people like Carrie who are away from Changzhou, but I seem to end up in 5-7 conversations at once. And these tend not to be easy conversations either. One person will just want to know more about what I'm doing on a minute by minute basis while another will be recounting some story of how their friends family will disown them if they don't do such and such, another person will be talking about their breakup with every hyperbole they can think of, another will be asking complex political or economic questions, while finally a last person will be having a conversation consisting only of emoticons, those little picture of a happy face and what not. It's exhausting to try to keep so many balls in the air all at once and I can't even read a news website while seven different people are trying to talk to me. It's not that I don't like QQ, it's just a chat program after all, but I just can't keep up with the volume. Maybe I should only get on at night after 80% of the students have gone to bed. It's nice to have so many people trying to talk with me but it can be a little much. They say that in the US most people surf the internet for news while in China its for entertainment and chatting, that's a fact I can certainly believe.