“Everyone’s doing it!” Those three words are most likely the reason that people like you and me are writing on your friend’s wall, hash tagging 140 characters and composing meaningless thoughts into a blog that no one is going to read. More than anything, those three words scare people. They’re afraid to be left behind socially and left out of the loop. With the way social networking sites have seriously altered personal relationships, people often consider themselves lost if they haven’t had internet access for more than a few hours, myself included.
So let’s break down (in multi-part posts) this social networking revolution as it happened to me and in the most basic and easy way to remember it… chronologically.
So let’s break down (in multi-part posts) this social networking revolution as it happened to me and in the most basic and easy way to remember it… chronologically.
It all started one great day when the UPS delivery person arrived at our house with an extremely large, heavy, cow-hide patterned box. This box contained the first computer that my family ever owned a Gateway 2000. The greatest thing about this state-of-the-art computer wasn’t the 200 MB hard drive, floppy disk drive or Windows 95; it was a program known as America On-Line or AOL for short. Everyone who had a computer had AOL because as far as I know, that’s the only way you could get on the internet. In addition to AOL you needed two very important things: a phone cord to connect your computer and no one in your family expecting a phone call. By possessing these essential items, you were primed and ready to hear the most annoying sound in the world followed by the greatest sound in the world.
Once online, the whole world was at your fingertips. You could look up anything you wanted to; barring you we’re willing to wait about a minute for each page to load or fifteen to listen to a song. But that’s not what you were looking for. Now that you’ve logged into AOL under your own screen name, you could go on AOL Instant Messenger or AIM and talk to all of your friends. But before I dive further into the features and perks of the Instant messaging, let’s talk about one of the most important decisions that a late 90’s or early 00’s pre-teenager had to make: choosing your screen name.
This is a decision that you contemplated in class, discussed with friends, and most importantly had to get approved by your parents. After days of deliberation, you finally came up with the best 3-10 character combination of your nickname, soccer number, favorite food and sports team; and now it was time to start setting up your account. You first enter your name, birthday (about 5-7 years older), gender and a bunch of other random stats. You then get the chance to type in your new identity to the online world… only to find out that it isn’t available. What do you do now? Go back to the drawing board and create a new super-awesome name? Nope. Much easier solution: add XoXo’s, misspell something, add random numbers, anything to alter that name just slightly enough so that your screen name is now available.
So now that you’re on AIM, who do you talk to? You just made your account, so you have no one on your “Buddy List.” Only thing to do add SmarterChild and try to trip him up. He was good though, always playing dumb when the talk got real. Never said any bad words, kept the conversation flowing and clean, and best of all was always online to talk to. SmarterChild was always there to chat when there was no one else online, and was one of the best secret keepers out there.
Once you grew tired of ambiguous responses from “bots” you had to fulfill a responsibility to yourself and your future buddies by creating and constantly updating your Buddy Info. This was the best way to share all of your feelings, opinions and thoughts… Or you could fill it with codes that entered the viewer’s screen name into a “____ 's mom is so fat" jokes, add a view counter that you run up so that people think you’re popular, fill it with your favorite quotes, and of course give a special shout out to your best friends.
Flash forward to the next day in school, you sit at your desk eagerly awaiting all your classmates to show up so you can pass them all notes to get their screen names so that you can write to them later about that very note that you just passed them. You don’t ask everyone for their screen names, and for a very good reason. You go home that day with your starting list of 5-10 friends ready to do some damage. You call each of them up, and see when they can tie up their phone lines so you can chat on the internet (of course that makes sense). Now you’ve logged on, have your buddy list up, and start entering your friends screen names. To keep them all organized, you create groups to put them all in. You have groups like “Boyz,” “Girlies,” “Baseball,” “School,” “Camp” and of course “Ignore.”
Now, one of the bigger perks of AIM was the ability to create your own buddy chat. In this window, you could have as many of your closest friends and/or enemies all reading what each person is saying. This always led to the best of confrontations between people. There would at first be casual talk, about how everyones day was and reminiscing on things that happened over the weekend or in class, until someone crossed the line. At that point, peoples courage grew infinitely strong. People could say exactly what they wanted to say to a person, without saying it to their face. Once one person started raining the hate, it came from everyone and hit everyone.
Let’s not forget about away messages. Intended to let people know that you were away from the computer, they were rarely used for that. They mostly contained song lyrics, quotes, jokes and pretty much anything that you wanted to write, except where you were or what you were doing. Essentially, they were an extension of your buddy info. The most interesting part was that you were never away when you an away message up, because if you actually left, you signed out.
Now the reason that you didn’t get everyone’s screen names was so you could pull this little trick off. You know that cutie in your class that you really have a crush on but are too afraid to talk to? Well, now is your chance. You simply get that crushes “sn” from one of your friends and send a message that starts like this “hey saw this sn on my buddy list who r u?” and before you know it you guys are hitting it off talking about just about anything until they g2g for dinner. It’s the perfect plan that worked just about every time. Only problem is that the ease of talking online never transfers into real life and you still are too nervous to talk to your crush outside AIM.
Even though your favorite conversation has ended, you look to the bottom of your screen and see three or four flashing yellow windows letting you know that there are still plenty of people to talk to… before your sister gets to use the computer in 10 minutes.
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