Find old aim away messages8/9/2023 ![]() Its pseudo-maturity and time-delayed interactions allured us. Then Facebook came along, with all the frisson of “only college students use it,” and we drifted there. Myspace and Xanga helped us set up temporary and ramshackle museums of our tastes. We invented our online selves-we invented ourselves. ![]() We made our first attempts, on AIM, of transfiguring our mysterious and unpredictable thoughts into lively and personable textual performances. We felt the world shiver and transform when our crush logged on and- boodleoop-started messaging us. We used lol to stand in not only for laughter or humor, but for any inarticulable mass of any emotion at all. We talked about the high-school musical, about the ending of Donnie Darko, about God and religion. (Then we didn’t do the reading.) We complained about how Mr. We asked how far you were supposed to read tonight in Gatsby. We asked if they had copied down the math problem sets. ![]() “What did you even talk about?” All the same stuff you text about now. Their away lights twinkled in a constellation of teenage social possibility. (We usually had to tread carefully around the ask.) And over a couple months, we assembled buddy lists of our friends and teammates and crushes and classmates. We didn’t ask for someone’s number, at least not then-an errant month of texting in 2005 could still cost $45, an exorbitant figure to the teenage mind-so we asked for their AIM. AIM was the club (see, Hobbes, Calvin and) and da club (see Cent, Fifty). AIM was the side of the library where everyone smoked. AIM was our best friend’s finished basement. So AIM became the original public-private space. I really mean that: As 9/11-jittered American parents were restricting access to the places where we could meet in public-the sociologist danah boyd writes about this in her book, It’s Complicated-we had to turn to AIM. (Gen X-ers: Don’t me about how you all proto-subtweeted on CompuServe or Usenet or ENIAC or whatever.) We felt the world shiver and transform when our crush logged on and- boodleoop-started messaging us.īut status messages were just the golden filigree of the gorgeous AIM tapestry. That’s right: AIM was so fertile and life-giving that we invented subtweeting to use it. But we never actually said that outright instead, we hinted at their sins and petty slights through suggestion and understatement. (We didn’t have Hamilton back then-I shudder to imagine what 2008 would’ve been like if we had.) From Brand New or Taking Back Sunday if you were pissed at your crush.Īnd then there were, sometimes concurrently with the song lyrics, the pained, cryptic, and egocentric recountings of the emotional trials of the day. Often they consisted of the quotation of vitally important song lyrics: from The Postal Service, from Dashboard Confessional, from blink-182, from Green Day, from The Beatles (only after Across the Universe came out), from RENT and Spring Awakening and The Last Five Years. They might have a succinct description of our emotional state. “What were they like?” As thunderous piano-accompanied art songs were to the sad young men of Romantic Germany, so were status messages to us. And iconic alert noises played at certain actions: the door-opening squeak when someone logged on, the door-closing click when they logged off, the boodleoop for every new message. (Since we didn’t have smartphones back then, its desktop-delimited-ness was self-explanatory.) You could set lengthy status messages with animated icons in them. It was like Gchat or iMessage, but you could only do it from a desktop computer. But when we invented it, we didn’t have text messages, we didn’t have Snapchat, we didn’t have group chats or Instagram DMs or school-provided Gmail accounts. That thing you know how to do, that cerebellum-wracking attentiveness to every character of the text message and what it might mean- we invented that. We were the first generation to spend two hours typing at our closest friends instead of finishing our homework, parsing and analyzing and worrying over “ u were so funny in class today” or “ nah lol youre pretty cool.” The words and the alert sounds swirl around you and you know how to read them and hear them because our culture-that we made-taught you how. You walk around in habitats of text, pop-up cathedrals of social language whose cornerstone is the rectangle in your pocket.
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