I fear being so flip with the tools I - we - used to construct our most intimate identities.
Maybe it’s tempting to consider our emo away messages with bemusement (I’m looking at you, Wall Street), our screen names with a *head slap* - until you remember that all we had were away messages and usernames. What does it mean when a technology that shaped your identity dies? Who did we become as users of those technologies? And what does it mean now that our messaging is stitched to our phone numbers, our Facebook profiles, our flesh-blood-and-birthdate selves? Perhaps it’s easy to dismiss our AIM ancestry, merely a blip in the Intro to Social Media textbooks. This surprised me until I realized what young women like me, who were becoming teenagers at the end of the ’90s, had in common with those brokers: We too were trading futures and commodities, but on AIM the potential gains were our teenage selves. I learned from Abbruzzese that a subset of those users worked on Wall Street. In “ The Rise and Fall of AIM, the Breakthrough AOL Never Wanted,” Jason Abbruzzese reported that, at its peak, AIM drew “as many as 18 million simultaneous users.” AIM paved the way for text messaging, Facebook, and beyond - all without (at least in the earliest years) profile pics. Cue sign-off sound effect, the Internet responded, eulogizing the service that introduced the world to buddy lists, away messages, and profiles, with a pastiche of levity, longing and lovingly-excavated personal ephemera. The news arrived last week, as unwelcome as a chat invite from your best friend’s mom: AOL was shutting down AIM, its messaging service. My last username was pennylane6985: equal parts The Beatles and “Almost Famous.” By that time - I was a junior in high school - I’d traded the Halfway to Heaven for espresso and vanilla cloves. When I outgrew Posh Spice, I slunk into Hollygolightly6985 with the release of “Man on the Moon,” I goofed into Kaufmaniac6985 when I’d memorized “American Beauty,” I snagged Spacey6985.
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My first AIM username was Gucci60525 - my zip code plus a nod to “Spiceworld” (“Should I wear the little Gucci dress, the little Gucci dress, or the little Gucci Dress?”). “That’s all homework?” my dad asks during a commercial. On TV, “Top Gun” plays on mute by the mantle, the Airedale sleeps the only sound in our house beside those knees is my fingers staccato on the keyboard.
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My dad is on the couch, and I shrink the chat windows whenever I hear his knees creak.
In addition to the notes feature, Instagram said it's testing out "candid stories," seemingly its take on the BeReal app's candid-photo-sharing platform, as well as group profiles, which will allow many people to collaborate and post on the same account.I’m in the dark family room, bouncing on my heels in the computer chair, leaning toward the monitor, slugging a can of Halfway to Heaven - the nickname the girls I’m IM-ing have for Diet Mountain Dew. The text is displayed as a short blurb over a user's avatar. The feature will appear in users' inboxes as a left-to-right scroll above their direct messages. "From asking for recommendations to sharing what they’re up to, Notes give people a casual and spontaneous way to express themselves and connect with each other." "During testing, we learned that people liked having a lightweight, easy way to share what’s on their mind and start conversations," Instagram explained in a blog post about the new feature. But in the 2020s, nostalgia for Y2K culture has shaped much of social media and fashion, giving Instagram an opportunity to seemingly reinvent the away message. With the rise of the Facebook status and later the Twitter tweet, social media users had new ways to share what was on their mind.
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