“AIM is the devil.” The black letters have faded since sophomore year, but the thin white homemade label has stuck faithfully to my Dell laptop. I’d tried to escape to the McClendon Tower, above Rick’s, to tackle an Islamic Civilizations paper during finals week. But that little yellow running man pursued me and my Internet connection.
After an hour of messaging, with nothing to show for my paper, another student who’d noticed my ridiculous procrastination came up and pressed the sticker on the edge of my keyboard.
“I think you should have this,” he added, smiling. Unfortunately, the sign still hasn’t curbed my appetite or cured my addiction.
It wasn’t always the case. Freshman year, I arrived at Blackwell having never heard of AIM. “What’s a screen name?” I had to ask my roommate, after she had set up her desktop with the long list of buddies ever-present on the side of her screen. By January, we were IMing each other across our cell-like room.
How did I get hooked? Well, it is convenient. And you can stay in touch with friends anywhere and anytime.
“I think that it’s perfect for people like me who have moved around a lot and really aren’t that interested in sending out tons of e-mails to people across the country,” says Nicole Ambrosetti, a senior.
If there’s no away message posted, you don’t have to worry about reaching an answering machine. “You can talk to people when it’s convenient for them, meaning when they’re online,” senior Tom Roller says. But you could also call them, so why IM instead?
“You don’t know if that’s a good time for them to talk,” Roller says. “If they’re online and not idle, you can assume it is.”
Or maybe you just don’t want to have to talk to the person. “You don’t have to deal with directly talking to people when you use IM,” senior Danielle Corneille says. “You can just leave people messages and know if they are away if you don’t actually feel like talking to them. Plus,” she adds, “you can stalk people on IM.”
Ode to the profile and away message, where we can expound on the mysteries of life and surviving college, bare our souls in blank screens, parade profound quotations from dead writers or personal poems, past IM conversations, Jack Handy musings, inside jokes. On AIM, we become our screen names, random or composed of our birthdays, old nicknames, favorite characters. With all this carefully crafted presentation, we’re no longer ourselves.
Maybe that’s a little harsh.
“I think you are talking to a different, more liberated version of the person,” Corneille says. “You can say things that you might not normally say because you don’t have to witness the reaction of the person you are talking to.”
It’s the American mantra, AIM-style: if you’re unhappy and you know it, click your mouse... and reinvent yourself.
We’ve been avid fans of personal reinvention since colonists came plowing across the Atlantic Ocean to begin new lives as landholders in the New World. From Jay Gatsby to Mr. Ripley, the characters of American literature also have a penchant for reinvention. And at the fifth-ranked school in the nation, where Blue Devils constantly strive to attain perfection through conformist reinvention, it’s not surprising that Instant Messenger has also become popular. Although thefacebook.com—where any member can invent their friends, interests and favorite music to create the perfect personality—may have surpassed AIM in this capacity, nothing beats sitting down behind someone else’s screen name and chatting with another human being, live. It’s the same rush an actor might experience on stage.
Are we forgetting ourselves in the process? Now that you can have contact with anyone on your buddy list anywhere and anytime, are we losing the ability to be alone? Every time I sit down to write a paper within reach of an Internet connection, that devilish yellow man tempts me. I’ve watched screen names stay online for as long as 29 days. That’s almost a month of being in constant contact with other people.
And that’s a serious addiction for most college students, and lately for other American adults as well. A Pew Internet and American Life Project study published in October 2004 found that 53 million American adults, or 42 percent of Internet users, use instant messaging. Since 2000, instant messaging has had a 29 percent growth rate, and roughly 13 million Americans will use it on any given day. College students, the project found, are even more hooked, and are more than twice as likely to use instant messaging on a given day than the average Internet user.
Of the instant messaging programs available, including MSN Messenger, ICQ, PalTalk and Trillian, PIALP found AOL Instant Message, a service offered to AOL members, and AOL Instant Messenger to be the most popular. Even the University has embraced the instant message movement. Thanks to Duke Student Government, students can now get the scoop on campus social happenings from the DevilDaily screen name instead of relying on word-of-mouth updates. And both Perkins and Lilly Libraries are developing a screen name for students to contact a reference librarian.
Hiding behind a screen name can become a powerful veil. Anyone can be HOTshit, sexy MaMa, SuperhERO, what have you. That funny-smelling guy who sits behind you in Chem 22 could be BRADpitt, the suave IM-er.
Then again, here at the school of “effortless perfection,” what better way for that smelly student, who others can’t stand to be around, to show his brilliant, witty side than through anonymous contact over Instant Messaging.
There’s something so easy about typing whatever you want and not having to witness the reaction of another human being standing in front of you—or even to hear it in their voice over the phone. With no way to register the contact that you’ve made with another person, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle kicks in—that person, as you think you know him, doesn’t even exist. Say anything, lay your soul in the white text box. Don’t think, just write. It’s almost a foolproof strategy.
Early Friday morning before fall break, I’m once again churning out a paper, this time on The Taming of the Shrew. AIM is facilitating a heated argument. One of my buddies messages me to tell me I’m fake, among other accusations. At 4 a.m., I’m more concerned with my paper and after an hour of rude exchanges, I call the buddy. His tone changes drastically on the phone. In fact, he’s actually very nice.
Please see "Continued: Damn the running man"
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