Those of us who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s fondly remember the halcyon days of chat rooms, lolspeak, and away messages. We know that, while some of the Ars audience were 1337 sysops on IRC channels, for a lot of us, AIM was the primary way to connect with our friends online across town and around the globe.
We asked readers on Twitter: would you share your AIM memories with us? Just a few sentences of what you remember most, what you got out of it, what, if anything, it taught you? The responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
High-school memories
Your tweet triggered a lot of memories for me! I was introduced to AOL while I was in middle school, and it was all about AIM in high school and into college. In high school, my girlfriends and I would swarm around the computer, doing group-think on chats with a boy one of us liked, yelling and giggling with each exchange. We used it to plan our first nights "out." In general, it was just like texting, but from a desktop. And we agonized over each "away message." They were a huge thing. When a girl in my class died in a car accident, her friends worked to keep her away message up as a way to memorialize her. I'll never forget. It said, "Cleaning ma room so I can keep ma car." As long as her away message was up, it felt like she was still there. It was maybe a week or so before her computer got shut down.
I remember using AIM my freshman year to stay connected with my high school friends and spending hours upon hours talking with my boyfriend (AtlasChill) who went to school in another state. I think it petered out in '05 or '06, although I wasn't on Facebook until '07.
For me, AIM is like that crossover between digital natives and the rest (is there a term?). I can remember a time before the Internet, but those online conversations and connections were hugely influential in my life during a formative time. It's not the same for my husband, who is four years older than me. Being able to relate to that experience of digital connection—and everything that goes with it—makes me a millennial by more than just age.
— Lindsay Patterson, 33, Barcelona, Spain
A means of human connection
AIM opened up a whole world of expression for me. I was pretty shy in my teens, and the idea of talking to girls face-to-face was frightening. On AIM, I felt like I could open up. I'd wait all day long at school till I could get home and talk to friends and girls, of course. It got to a point where my parents thought I was obsessed with the program. It wasn't the program I couldn't do without—it was human connection.
While I make it sound like I loved those days, I don't really look back on it fondly. It was a frustrating time. I'd play this cat and mouse with girls, leaving tiny innuendos when I could while never taking a chance by telling anyone how I really felt.
Regardless, I have vivid memories of that time—away statuses that included lines from emo songs, link to my Xanga blog in my profile, profile pictures made in MS Paint and my screen name, my identity, GoDodgers22. For better or worse, AIM came to represent the ups and downs of my teenage years, but time and technology have left it long behind. Its official death now is nothing more than an occasion to remember and give one final sign off, one final door slam sound.
— Christopher Yee, 32, Los Angeles
So many alts
I remember that there was no real verification when creating accounts, so I just had dozens of alts just because I could (and mainly based on topical Simpsons references, fosterpussycatkillkill was one I had, plus foslerpussycatkillkill).My first brush with analytics was in AIM as there was a way you could create a link in your buddy profile so that the link would open inside your profile, and since there was a way to make somebody's screen name show up in your profile that meant you could include the person viewing your profile in the link and see who was viewing your profile.
— Calvin Metcalf, 33, Boston
Bridging geographical distances
AOL and AIM were my primary mode of communication from high school through college. I had a group of friends I met through my favorite band’s fan page on AOL, and I only ever talked to them through AIM. I’ve since met several of them in real life, and they’ve been an integral part of my world since we met as high schoolers. Now we are all Facebook friends. During college, before any of us had cell phones or spare money for long distance phone calls, it was how I kept up with all my friends from home. When I met my future husband via LiveJournal, we moved on to chatting on AIM—his college didn’t have a cell tower yet, so phone calls were not a great option. More than that, I’ve always been more comfortable conversing via the written word than over the phone. I still prefer it. AIM bridged this vast gap in the communications world and enabled me to meet and keep friends I never would have otherwise. It’s been entirely eclipsed by text messaging now, but I will be forever grateful that it existed when it did.
— Joanna Chin, 36, Castro Valley, California
Laying the foundations for how we communicate today
Looking purely at language, as perhaps the most obvious and flexible of cultural indicators, AIM ushered in a massive influx of tech-speak into the modern vernacular. So much of the tech-related language and the schemes we use to continue to develop tech-language today has its foundation in the AIM era—lol. If we look at the demographics of today’s world, so many people in business and culture today came of age in the AIM era. AIM laid the foundation for the way that we all talk, communicate, define and understand the world around us, technology and beyond, as digital natives.
— Dex Polizzi, 32, Montclair, New Jersey
Transition away from meatspace interactions
For most people in my age group AIM was our introduction to online chats. This was before text messages and social media so the ability to talk to friends without using a phone was pretty revolutionary. For many of us it opened up a social world that we otherwise wouldn't have. At the time there was this transition from "real world" interaction to digital interactions and AIM was the driving force. Looking back I was only on it for about five years, but it definitely holds a special place in my heart.— Vsem Yenovkian, 38, Las Vegas, Nevada
Cultivating an online persona
AIM provided my first lesson in how to sculpt and cultivate the way other people online could see you. At 13, I had some really depressing Staind lyrics in my buddy profile because I thought Staind was cool. A classmate IMed to tell me they made me seem aloof and depressing. This being middle school, I changed it immediately to something more upbeat (probably some DMB lyrics). This might sound like a victory for conformity, but it was my first stop along the path to realize that you can share pellets of your personality and still keep some of it for yourself. Still navigating that now; we all are. But I think AIM gave me my first experience learning that how you present yourself socially can actually matter to how people see you.
— Patrick Hosken, 27, New York City
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