AIM away messages walked so that Slack statuses could run.
By @xenayk · Nostalgia
I was thinking about how much personality we used to pack into our cringey AIM and MSN away messages. Now our work statuses are just green dots and calendar icons, and it feels like we've lost something.
The full story
I had a moment of intense nostalgia at work today looking at my Slack sidebar. A sea of green dots for 'active,' orange calendars for 'in a meeting,' and the occasional palm tree for 'on vacation.' It’s efficient, professional, and utterly devoid of life. It made me miss the wild west of the early 2000s internet: the AIM buddy list. Your away message was a work of art. It was a personal billboard designed to broadcast your exact emotional state to a very specific audience (usually, one person). It was a carefully selected Dashboard Confessional lyric to show you were deep in your feelings. It was an inside joke with your best friend. It was something so vague and dramatic, like '~*~don't say you miss me when you don't even care~*~,' that you hoped your crush would see it and immediately message you asking 'what's wrong??' The buddy list itself was a social hierarchy. Who was in your 'Best Friends' group vs. 'Acquaintances'? The custom login/logout sounds. The anxiety of seeing someone log on and then immediately log off. The pure rage of getting a 'Your buddy list is full' error. Was it all a bit dramatic and cringey? Absolutely. But it had more personality in one angsty lyric than my entire professional digital presence has today. We’ve traded creativity and personal expression for hyper-efficiency. You can't subtweet a coworker with an AFI lyric in your Teams status. You can’t set a custom sound for when your boss signs on. We've sanitized our online interactions to the point of being robotic, and I think we're worse off for it.
How people voted
- Bad Move — 38% (37 votes)
- Needs Context — 35% (34 votes)
- Reasonable — 28% (27 votes)
Readers are split: “Bad Move” leads with 38% — 98 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@zoeyok — My entire middle school social life was dictated by who was in my 'top friends' buddy group. It was brutal.
@owenish — Do you really want your accountant to know your deepest emotional state via a Fall Out Boy lyric?
@kindathough — This is so true! It felt like we had a little more soul online back then. Everything is so sterile now.
@quinnok — I for one am glad I no longer have to decipher which Taking Back Sunday lyric is about me.
@violetmaybe — time to make my slack status ~*not every closed eye is sleeping*~ and see what happens
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