2017-10-08: Waxing nostalgic

Dating myself here, but my after-school life through middle to high school consisted of mostly four things: AIM, Quake, Graal, and writing.

This week AIM announced it is shutting down. I haven't used or even looked at AIM for about 5 years but it's still one of those sobering reminders that a lot of the mainstays that formed my developmental life are either gone or changed. I peeked in at AIM and my buddy list was empty; I presume everyone on it hasn't logged in in about as many years as I have not. It's also... sobering... how many people there are that moved on with their lives and lost contact and I'll probably never see them again.

While kicking around news articles about the AIM shutdown, I found one interesting description of the service: "A secular confession box for 90s and 00s teens" and... yeah, definitely. In a way this is where the mentality of freedom from consequences online started. You could hit someone up and talk to them, say anything, and once you logged off you were nobody to them. You'd talk to strangers about your life, your day, who you loved, who you hated. You'd give advice, get advice; these people would change how you felt and how you lived but at the end of the day beyond the screenname you rarely knew who they were. The generation of adults today were raised on the lack of permanence presence then.

In the waning years of AIM, the MO of messaging and chat changed a bit. Instead of 1 on 1 conversations leading to group chats, we moved toward broadcasting sometimes leading into 1 on 1, but often not. Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Telegram... they all kind of lead more to just blatting your thoughts out into the ether and seeing who replies; but more often than not no one does. I think it's kind of sad; but then again I was one of those people who, in the absence of Twitter, just pinned someone down on AIM and said what I woulda tweeted anyway.

I don't know, maybe I'm just being an old coot and sitting here in nostalgia but really: so much of my personal development happened in red-on-black in an AIM window. I don't know for sure if we're better or worse off for that method of conversation being gone, but I feel an order of abstraction more disconnected from current society in its departure.

As for Graal, that's still around but not in the way it was when I was there. I should talk about that sometime.

tags: personal