AOL Instant Messenger: A Short Social History
My first memory of any form of social media technology was using AIM in the 5th grade. It is less of a single memory and more of a phase of my life that consisted of a classic afternoon routine. I step off the school bus on any random weekday, throw down my backpack and run down the street to Hannah Jones’ house. I wasn’t allowed to use our computer at home but Hannah had two older sisters so they had an iMac desktop in the basement just for the kids. I would pull up a stool and breathe down Hannah’s neck as she logged onto her AIM and we decided who in our class we were going to Instant message.
The year was 2009 and what still sticks out the most to me is how much of a thrill watching someone else use AIM was. The truth is that thrill was embedded in a sense of connection I had never experienced before. One that was characterized both by an ability to reach more people than ever, but also, to have that capacity for connection privately. After all, these were opportunities for conversation that were, at the time, off the radar of my parents and the authority figures at school whose understanding of tech may have been worse than mine as a ten year old. The privacy from parents that AIM allowed and the ability to communicate with anyone who didn’t live on our block was unprecedented in our lives. It opened up an avenue for expression, and social experimentation where there had not been one before, even if mine was vicarioulsy through Hannah and her screename. In her popular memoir, Everything I know About Love, Dolly Alderton (2021) comically and quite dramatically summed up what AIM was to the average middle-schooler living in Suburbia:
When I downloaded MSN Messenger and started adding email address contacts… it was like knocking on the wall of a prison cell and hearing someone tap back. It was like finding blades of grass on Mars. It was like turning the knob of the radio on and finally hearing the crackle smooth into a human voice. It was an escape out of my suburban doldrums and into an abundance of human life. (pp. 7)
Popularity among the younger generation is part of what made AIM so successful in the early 2000s. The platform was first introduced in 1997 by a group of digital engineers who launched the site somewhat illicitly in the eyes of parent company AOL and by 2000 had 61 million users (Delgado 2022). The service was also completely free to join, which contributed both to its popularity with the masses and its less favorable view by company heads.
Notably, AIM’s sustained prevalence through the 2000s was not only due to the adoration of young adults. In fact, AIM was only part-time as a platform for the exchange of feverent flirting attempts between middle-schoolers and their crushes and its day-job was very much rooted in the professional world. Wall Street in particular was very reliant on AIM as a messaging system between employees (Delgado 2022). In addition, many of AIM’s key features were developed to meet the needs of professional usage. For example, the ‘buddy list’ that displayed when any of your contacts were active online and the ‘away’ message that allowed you to craft a message to stay posted while you were not online. Both of these elements can still be seen today in technology used for the work place (ie; Slack or Microsoft Teams).
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These key features are also still prominent on modern social media platforms. Think, for example, of the top bar in our Instagram direct messages that was added only a few weeks ago and which allows us to see who of our followers are active along with a small quote box for personalized text from the user. Facebook Messenger also offers a similar view of active profiles and the AIM ‘away’ message is often thought of as the original Facebook status as the first internet component to allow a type of curated statement that would stay stagnant on a ‘profile’.
With a great boom in popularity also came an eventual bust for AIM. In 2017, AOL announced that the last instant messenger would be sent over the platform after a steep decline in usership thanks in part to people switching to more mobile centric messaging (Sklar 2017).
In her goodbye ode to AIM via an article in the MIT Technology Review, Julia Sklar surmised that maybe we can see elements of AIM everywhere in our modern-day tech comm platforms because many of their creators were themselves influenced by AIM in young adulthood (Sklar 2017). It served as the introduction to so many people to existing in two worlds, the physical and the digital, including those who would go on to continue building in that digital space.
While AIM is now defunct, the feelings that it stirred in excited tweens and teens around the globe were foundational emotional responses to connection and expression that paved the way for the explosion of other social media platforms down the line. Perhaps just as importantly, the elements that were built into even the early stages of the platform can still be seen in some form today across other social media channels, effectively immortalizing its influence.
REFERENCES
Alderton, D. (2021). Everything I Know about Love: A Memoir. HarperPerennial.
Delgado, M. (2022, May 16). In the 25 Years Since Its Launch, AOL Instant Messenger Has Never Been ‘Away’. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/in-25-years-since-its-launch-aol-instant-messenger-has-never-been-away-180980086/
Sklar, J. (2017, December 14). AOL Instant Messenger Made Social Media What It Is Today. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/12/14/67582/aol-instant-messenger-made-social-media-what-it-is-today/
Romano, A. (2017, December 15). AIM shuts down: AOL Instant Messenger changed the way we communicate. Vox. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/15/16780418/aim-aol-instant-messenger-shutdown-cultural-impact
