Dead Aim: (Finally) Saying Goodbye to AOL Instant Messenger

Every day was the same. I’d clench my teeth for almost an hour as our school bus waltzed through the labyrinthine suburban streets between Parker Middle School and my little corner of the world on the other side of town. Once we finally arrived on my shady lane, I’d run inside the house, tell my mother my day was ‘just fine’ and then I’d dash up the stairs to the family computer, quietly resting there each day like a present waiting to be opened. I’d wait for what seemed like hours for the machine to wake up, go through the anxiety-inducing process of hearing the buzz and hum of the modem making synaptic connections through wires and space, arriving somehow on the world wide web. Then, at the word “Welcome,” we had liftoff. I was transported to the world of screen names and chat rooms and emoticons, which in my juvenile mind, was akin to some blindingly bright heaven on earth. All the people I passed in the hallway earlier in the day were there. So were all my friends from camp. So were millions and millions of strangers who, after the requisite “a/s/l?,” were potential best friends for life. It was a thrilling experience, signing on every day to chat about nothing but who was going out with whom, what you were doing this weekend (nothing), and what music videos on TRL were totally overrated. It was as big as my world got at that point. And even if the spatial range was quite limited, the possibilities it contained seemed endless.

I have a strange tendency to hold on to things longer than I should—be they t-shirts from sixth grade or old letters from forgotten friends or 10-day-old pizza in the refrigerator. Even after something has become useless or moldy or passé or devoid of any real meaning, it’s still not easy for me to get rid of it and banish it from my life forever. This propensity to hold on too long explains why, as recent as this past week, I was signing on regularly to AOL Instant Messenger (aka AIM)—nearly 15 years after I first appeared on the scene as “Carthage45” (a reference to the North African home of Hannibal—in case you had any doubts that I was not a dork)—in spite of the fact that I didn’t know anyone else who used it anymore. For the uninitiated, AIM was created as an instant messaging service initially part of America Online (AOL), an internet service provider that unbelievably still exists. AIM soon developed as a stand-alone instant messaging system that allowed you to compile a ‘buddy list’ of screen names of people you knew who you could then chat with. From the time it first became available, I was hooked. It has now been part of my life for so long as a source of communication and connection and the airing of grievances, it has become daunting to say farewell, in spite of the fact that AIM has completely lost all the usefulness that initially drew me in.  

What AIM has meant to me over the years is hard to quantify. It was, in its earliest stages, a way to solidify friendships, obtain breaking news updates from the soap opera that was middle school, and gain a foothold in some external space even when I lived in a world that was regimented by parents who were hung up on making sure I did my homework and got to bed on time. Later, at boarding school, it became a lifeline to the distant outside world—as it was the only practical way I could keep in touch with friends back home or people who were locked up in other dorms after lights out. In college, the device lost a lot of its luster, but it still served as a means to keep in touch with friends from high school, and a way to easily figure out where people were going out or what the assignment in English class was. Since that time, it has basically been a quiet, uncrowded room where people from the past would appear without warning, out of thin air, to say “hello, how are you?” and then disappear into the murky deep once again. One by one, the screen names I was so used to seeing pop up on my buddy list each afternoon like clockwork vanished completely until only one or two appeared with any regularity. In the last couple of months, even those few remaining holdouts have completely abandoned it. Now, I feel like I’m the last person in the room, left behind to turn out the lights before the party is closed down for good.

With the prevalence of so many means of digitally communicating with people—from Gchat to Facebook to text messaging—the utility of AIM has declined drastically in the last five to seven years. Some studies report that AIM held over 50 percent of the instant messaging market as recent as 2006, a number which has now dropped to less than 1 percent—a staggering decline even in the ever-changing world of communications. People stopped using AIM simply because there were suddenly so many other easier, hipper ways to tell someone you were too tired to watch a Star Wars marathon. Especially as mobile phone technology has grown, the ability to stay in touch with friends at every hour of the day has become a real possibility (and for some, a necessity). No longer do you have to wait to get home to sign on and hope that someone else is online—you can just text them or send a message on Facebook or tweet at them or facetime them or whatever. As has been the case with much of our recent technological advancement, communication tools are forever shifting and adapting to find new methods to make our interactions with others more instant and more controlling of our lives. Though AIM was for many people an obsession that took up a substantial amount of time, there was still the ability to eventually sign off and return to a haven without the ding of a new instant message. That wall that provided some sense of privacy and distance has since been shattered by ‘improved’ technology, thus destroying the need for an Instant Messenger service that was dependent upon making yourself available at the exact same time someone else did. Somehow, I miss that idea.

A few months ago, I pulled out the old laptop that I had in high school. Out of curiosity, I turned on the shockingly clunky apparatus just to see what was contained inside. Amidst the folders for Napster and papers for 10^th grade history class, I noticed a program known as Dead AIM, which if I remember correctly was somehow ‘better’ than your average AIM. Unbeknownst to me, that program had logged every conversation I’d ever had while using it. And I, perpetually bored and self-reflective, decided to read all of what was documented there, trying to decipher cryptic messages like they had been transmitted by unknown beings from outer space. Like my recent foray into examining old notebooks of poetry, this experience was uncomfortable and unsettling—envisioning myself so long ago, typing furiously into the night, trying to be funny, trying to sound smart, trying to create real connections with people. It captured, in just the couple of months that I used Dead AIM, so much about what high school was like. Whether I was arguing politics or reveling in oblique away messages (which would soon be replaced elsewhere by ‘status messages’), the chats were all foreign and fascinating, like some kind of time capsule I had forgotten I’d buried in the back yard.

Just as my reticence to throw away old shoes has nothing to do with any deep-seated love for the rubber in their soles, my inability to sign off from AIM forever has nothing to do with its design or functionality.  I’m not attached to the medium itself, but to what happened there. That feeling of possibility, of being able to instantly and directly communicate with dozens of people with the reckless abandon of adolescence is what I feel I’m leaving behind. Because in many ways, I still chat as I did then, just in a more mature and limited form. But it somehow isn’t the same. Even on this occasion, as I finally decide to not sign on to AIM anymore, I doubt that I will actually delete the program from my computer. I will leave that primitive golden yellow running man icon on my desktop so that I can be occasionally reminded of what it was like to come home after school and chat with friends or stay up late into the night telling bad jokes and quoting terrible song lyrics to people I hardly knew and not think a thing of it. And I guess, in the end, that has to be worth something.