Blog 6: Identity and AIM

When I was in elementary school and first started exploring the internet I mainly used AOL Instant Messenger. My parents were weary of me communicating with potential strangers via this new technology, but understood that I was interested in talking to my friends online, so allowed me to do so with somewhat close monitoring. They imposed regulations on my screen name choice after hearing that my cousin had chosen a rather provocative name for a 12 year-old: “bikinibabe02”. The rules were that I could not use any part of my name in my screen name, nor was I allowed to use any suggestive language, like that of my cousin’s. After many shot-down requests, I finally settled on “beachball66,” which didn’t give strangers or 10 year-old boys for that matter any images, but still had the word, “beach” in it.
Being that this was my first experience with online identities, I totally ate it up. Kids were judged by the cleverness of their screen names and their online personas formed based on their interactions. Another rule by which I had to abide in order to talk online was the amount of time I spent doing so. I had one hour per day to chat online, which at the time seemed like minutes compared to some of my friends who would never sign off. Those who spent more time online developed a better sense of one another’s online identities. Eventually, the distinctions between people’s online and in-person identities began to corrode. People’s online reputations developed based on a number of different factors: their popularity in school, the name they chose to represent themselves by, the types of interactions they had, and with whom they interacted.
The day that a new online popularity measure was developed became a nightmare for any popularity-conscious pre-teenage girl. AIM Fight measured people’s online popularity by calculating how many different people’s buddy lists an individual was on. In addition, your score would depend on the people’s buddy lists you were on, for three degrees. So, your popularity would be greatly affected by being on the buddy list of a person who was on many other people’s buddy lists, but not affected much by being on an un-popular person’s buddy list. For a better explanation, see http://aimfight.com/whatisaimfight.php. With AIM Fight, my online reputation was no longer only known to me; anyone who knew my screen name could see my popularity score. Obviously, as a competitive pre-teen I became obsessed with checking my ranking against my friends’. Our reputations had been degraded from being formed based on character judgment to being formed by a silly computer-generated popularity-ranking technology.

After the trauma caused by AIM Fight had eventually dissipated, incidents occurred where my friends were getting a hold of each other’s AIM passwords. As many mischievous, curiosity seeking teenagers might do, kids were getting together at one house and posing as another person. All sorts of likely inaccurate information was exchanged, and we used this as a means to finding out all of the latest classroom juice: who was crushing on who, and so forth. The potential reputation damage this behavior could have and probably at times did cause, was extreme. What is astounding is that despite the fact that kids were assuming others’ identities to gossip, we still trusted one another’s online personas. I know that personally, I was more guarded about who I spoke to and what about after I was made aware these activities, but the fact that we all still trusted these identities is unbelievable to me now. We were young, but we had no way of knowing for sure whether or not people were being truthful. I imagine that this is the reason many people trust strangers: they want them to be who they say they are, and there is no way of knowing for sure.

Source:

AIM Fight. (1998). [Graphic representation of three degrees of AIM Fight]. Retrieved from http://aimfight.com/whatisaimfight.php