Like me, he spent his formative years constructing an online social identity, messaging with friends and tweaking his profile to reflect his mood. This weekend, Mark Zuckerberg posted a eulogy of his own for AIM. AOL never figured out how to monetize it digital culture evolved toward social media and social networks, and the chat prototype became obsolete. AIM became a ghost town, an abandoned civilization of emo away messages and trippy fonts. I fell in love with the quintessentially modern sensation of speech flowing from my fingers rather than my mouth, transmogrified into text at the speed of thought.Īnd then, one by one, we all packed up and left for greener pastures: Friendster, iChat, Google, Facebook. (When winter rolled around and it came time to cut things off, that happened on AIM, too.) It was the first truly generational experience I was aware of having as it happened, a social world defined by language, mores, and methods completely alien to my parents. AIM spread rumors and jokes as fast as they could be copy-pasted, and kept summer-camp romances alive well past their August expiration dates. My family didn’t have a computer, but when we got one, AIM became the cafeteria and the clubhouse, the place where everyone I knew went to meet up and joke around and gossip and fight and flirt. It was 1997, the year that AIM launched I had taken the school bus home with a friend and watched as she and another classmate of ours volleyed messages back and forth between their computers with mind-boggling speed. I vividly remember the moment when I first saw it in action. AIM genuinely deserves the eulogies it’s been getting, though it utterly changed the way people communicate online, and so the way people communicate, period. Millennials get flak for being excessively prone to nostalgia, but nostalgia is hard to avoid when you come of age in an era of unfettered capitalism married to unprecedented technological change. If you want to talk, look for me on Gchat-I mean Google Hangouts, or whatever it’s called now. I bequeath my tween self to the digital void. Are people still on there, roaming their barren Buddy Lists like the survivors in a zombie film, searching for other active users to share one last lol with? I’d check it out myself, but while I remember my screen name (childhood cat + initials + birthday backwards) as though it was assigned to me at birth, my password (camp mascot + bat mitzvah Torah portion? or “Rent” lyric + lucky number?) has been forever lost to time. Last Friday, AOL announced that the chat service will shut down for good on December 15th-a surprise to the many who assumed it had died a quiet death long ago. Pour one out on your keyboard for AOL Instant Messenger.
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