The article investigates the shift of much interpersonal communication from phone or face-to-face interaction to Instant Messaging, especially among teenagers. This objectification of conversation enabled changes in myriad social practices, as well as in regimes of intimacy and truth: New, invisible audiences are introduced to hitherto intimate situations for real-time consultations; intimacy, traditionally based on exclusivity in access to events and information, has to be reshaped under the new conditions as "network intimacy"; formerly separate events collapse into new frames, challenging traditional temporal sequencing of sociability; conversations are imbued with performativities of different sorts; and proof and evidence are introduced into interpersonal sphere where they weren't common before.At the age of 23, Y. from Tel-Aviv received an unusual present from his father: a book, containing transcripts of many past family conversations. The book also contained nasty things Y. and his parents said to one another, which, for Y., proves his father to be 'fucked-up'. Y.'s father printed another copy of the book as a gift for Y.'s mother, a memento, a family album of sort. This anecdote may be considered idiosyncratic, but the materials it is made of are becoming salient in our culture, and represent a wide shift, motivated by certain technosocial developments.A large part of interpersonal interaction has recently been relocated to Instant Messaging software (IM) and phone text-messages (SMS). Y.'s father had conversation transcripts because many of his interactions with Y. were IM-conversations (and even more so when Y. was abroad). IM software (like ICQ, MSN-Messenger and Google-Chat) enables users to initiate a written real-time dyadic conversation with another person from a contact-list. Its use is most common among teenagers and tech-savvy youngadults. Every casual IM conversation leaves behind it a digital trace: a full protocol or log, often archived by default. Thus, unlike earlier mediated-communication technologies (like phones), IM objectifies interactions, turns them into data-objects, fixed in time, subject to search-queries, copying, sharing, quoting, and re-use. IM totalizes a large share of social interaction in the form of a database, and introduces evident intertextuality to sundry social practices. Spontaneous conversation is an extremely important component of sociability. Thus, whereas the classical literature on literacy focused on how writing and print moulded subjectivity (Ong, 1982, on consciousness and memory; Eisenstein, 1980, on imagination and individuality), it seems worthwhile to study IM while focusing on how writing spontaneous conversation affects intersubjectivity and interpersonal relations.Some social aspects of the shift from oral communication to written chats have already been studied. For example, Mantovani (2001) and Ben-Ze'ev (2004) explored online romance, including changes in the criteria for initial evaluation of potential partners; information management; and the co...