Many people have successfully abstracted away the difference between face to face conversation and the stunted (no body language etc.) interface over IM and tend to treat them in a similar way.

Especially with people they communicate and interact with in an office environment. The IM 'text line' tends to not limit typical expressive communication as much as you would think (even without smileys).

Anyway... begone "it's fake i can tell by the pixels".

He may not have copied a literal transcript from his IM logs, but you get the fucking point.