If we were super bored, we’d open a new window for Smarter Child and see what they were up to. We’d sneakily put our crush’s SNs on our buddy lists and get giddy when we heard the sound of the door opening and their name flash up on our ~*u kNo wHo*~ buddy list (1/1).
AIM let us make our first internet identities with vague SNs (screennames duh) that gave others a hint of our interests and/or hobbies (one of my first ones had “BSB” in it).
#AIM AWAY MESSAGES HOW TO#
It’s where we first learned how to abbrev – “brb”, “a/s/l?”, “nm, u?” etc. We’d perfect our AIM profiles with the right quotes and shoutout to friends using their initials – it was a precursor to perfect a Facebook profile. We’d spend all day at school with friends, only to go home and turn on AIM to talk to friends some more.
It was social networking before we knew what social networking was. Before Snapchat, Instagram, GChat, Twitter, Facebook, and kinda before texting, there was AIM. Like many millennials, I haven’t used AIM in years, but it was such an integral part to our lives when the internet was just becoming a thing in the late 90s/early 2000s. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories /V09Fl7EPMx A lyric out of context creates, immediately, a stronger connection between two strangers based on a mutual feeling: Yes, user, I know that song, and we are all stars now in the dope show.All good things come to an end. You could retweet people saying “ With the birds I share this lonely view,” or “ It’s all about the he-says, she-says bullshit,” or “ We’re all stars now in the dope show” for days on end and you’d still never get to the first time someone tweeted it, borne from the same primal impulse that drove us to put up away messages. Listening to a Drake song or a Beyoncé album for the first time requires a kind of metatextual labor where you are seeking the one lyric that could be tweeted, that could become a meme, that could be the building block for a new cultural language. After the release of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, Pitchfork contributor Liz Pelly compiled a story for the erstwhile Boston Phoenix about teenagers tweeting every lyric on the album within just 24 hours. The cultural tradition of posting song lyrics without context has not abated, becoming a language in and of itself on Twitter. Remember how you could warn people and they would have a warning level? (Imagine wielding that power on Twitter today, people trying to get their warning level to 69 percent.) My Pavlovian response to all of this seems tied to those throes of adolescence and sharing, for the first time, how I was feeling over the internet, most often through lyrics. I don’t exclusively mean to wax nostalgic here, though I do have a tab open of a message board post from 2003 titled, “Way to have AIM display what song I'm currently listening to in Winamp?” and my body is filled with the kind of spiky, anxious feeling that comes when you see a bottle of CK One or hear the original, acoustic version of “ Hands Down.” Remember the sound of the door opening when someone from your “buddy list” came online? Just listen to this collection of AIM sound effects and see if you don’t seize up recalling a teary fight with a significant other as those sounds rang out in increasing chaos. That was the gist of the AIM away message, one of the first, most popular ways of establishing a shorthand emotional connection with people online through music. I could just go out and post something like, “teen drinking is very bad. Picture, if you will, a primordial time when being “away” from the internet was an entirely normal thing that didn’t need to be proclaimed as some kind of sanctimonious spiritual hiatus.
There are no more away messages because, you know, are we ever even away anymore? Ostensibly, we’re always here, online, posting messages. This is fine because no one has used it seriously since maybe The Black Parade, or since G-Chat took over with its tiny away messages that eventually disappeared with the onset of the modern social media shitscape as we know it. AOL announced today that it would be closing AIM for good in December.
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