Away message lessons

How many times have you caught yourself idly scrolling through AOL Instant Messenger away messages when you were supposed to be studying? College students exist in an always-on network of instant communication. We can easily monitor friends’ whereabouts with a quick glance at an away message, which has become a new type of communication in itself.

One of the best things about Instant Messenger is the way you can get a point across to another person without ever actually saying anything to him, all the while involving anyone who cares to read your profile in whatever psychodrama is playing out in cyberspace. How do you define the type of communication taking place when you read an ex-girlfriend’s away message and your heart starts to pound a little harder as you consider whether its sarcastic words are about you? Should you be angry that she would air your dirty laundry to anyone reading her away messages, or chide yourself for thinking everything she says is about you? Away messages manage to be effective tools of psychological torture even when they are just randomly generated sentences you made up while drinking.

My buddy list has more than 100 screennames, yet I converse with fewer than 20 of them on a regular basis. The others are people I once knew or perhaps know through someone else, but even if I have never met them, I know what songs they like, what their boyfriends’ names are and that they are currently “pre-gaming before Bentley’s.” In some cases, I’ve regularly checked a person’s AIM profile without actually talking to him or her in several years. People tend to put just enough in their profiles that it’s possible to follow their lives pretty closely.

So we have this web of people, all interconnected and present on each other’s screens as clever pseudonyms, and a new form of communication has formed. It’s analogous to keeping a row of bulletin boards on your wall and assigning one to each of your friends, adding to the collection whenever you meet someone new. You don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to, but you can easily walk down the row of boards and read what everyone has posted on them. Some change constantly, others never do, and you never actually see the people behind them. The contents of their boards build a picture in your mind of where they are and what they are doing.

And of course, no one knows if you’re even reading his bulletin board, and you don’t know if anyone is reading yours. It’s as if AIM has become the new collective unconscious into which we deposit information and a part of ourselves. As we move from AIM toward entirely mobile networks based on cell phones, we can only imagine the way communication will evolve in the next decade or so.

I feel lucky to have experienced the AIM “revolution” (clearly a college-based phenomenon) firsthand. It could turn out to be one of the most significant steps in the evolution of human communication in history. At the very least, it’s a fun way to avoid studying.

Alex Dzwonchyk is a senior linguistics major. He can be reached at alexdz@wam.umd.edu.