This is the first issue (edition?) of an irregularly (or regularly?) published newsletter called chatroom that’s, broadly, about talking on the internet, or about anything that fits in this space that people don’t mind reading. More specifically, I’m interested in revisiting parts of the internet that shaped that way I communicate, intentionally or not, whether that’s being banned from an AOL ska chat room or being surveilled by a billion porcelain-faced ghouls selling aluminum siding because I “liked” a post about affordable housing.
The idea for this kind of place came out of conversations with one of my best friends over Google Hangout, formerly Google Chat, or Google Talk, all terms that nobody uses except cops and the people who made Google Hangout, whose users collectively and independently decided to call everything under Google’s umbrella of video and text messaging interface gchat. Could we make a newsletter or website or something that’s just our conversations, I asked my friend, or something to write about the places where we have those conversations, and why we do that, or whatever else is going on, a lot, probably. Why not, I said. Great. That spiraled into a partly nostalgic, sort of revisionist history of My Time Online, with some light reporting and big thoughts about it all from me, the bad millennial on which all articles about them are based. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you should subscribe. Thanks for reading.
“Are you on gchat?”
Those words are among the four sweetest in the workplace, often delivered just above a whisper and with a wink of acknowledgement that, yes, I too would love to explode the building, and I am opening to you a portal to a shared hell, and would you like to join. Yes, you both nod, and off you go down an Acme hole.
Opening a window in Google Hangouts is a pit into which the dark borderline-murderous mind-goblins of my work-poisoned brain go to dance with their friends from other similarly grim corners of the virtual office world.
It’s both a flotation device in a sea of dread and an addictive and vile thing that the receiving person doesn’t necessarily want and will resent you for receiving, and you feed that little discrete window in one of your many open tabs, tossing your duck friends the little kibbles of your garbage, baggage, thoughts, frustrations, gossip and steam-blowing bullshit to decompress the uneasy tension in your skull.
It’s easy to make fun of the people who assume Twitter is where people go to talk about “what they had for breakfast,” as if that’s the low-grade panic attack we endure by logging into that cursed site, when we all know gchat is worse; it actually is that, plus what you think about the breakfast-serving person. But that delicious foam noodle floatie of a private chat room is likely preventing a bulk of the online American workforce from flushing their heads down the toilet.
How did we get to be so comfortable in this anxious new era of window-hopping telephone tag? For many of its millennial-era users, they likely were introduced to a dedicated person-to-person chat space through the demonic lure of AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM). The drama of Logging On through dial up, without knowing who also was online and horny for talking, then having an empty white window to share privately, and not anonymously, words you can see (and save, if you were a specific kind of weirdo) — it immediately felt essential to daily life. Sweating in my mom’s office chair in anticipation to the gentle sounds of a screeching modem and “door opening” and “door closing” sounds that seemed to play at only one volume (Bad).
Hold on a second newsletterman, what in the heck is gchat, you might be asking. First of all, congratulations, your brain is regular, or you are an Older person, and do not concern yourselves with the vices of youth.
Google rolled out its Talk peer-to-peer messaging service for mail users in the mid-2000s (and even integrated AIM!) before launching its Chat in 2008. A few years later, Google replaced it with Hangouts.
Why we send an “instant message”: Empathy or sympathy in a time of distress, a place to vent, someone on the other end to share that momentary boredom and return a “hello” to know you’re not alone, someone to laugh at a good tweet. It’s a small but potent empty box that a generation or two has come to know as an addictive emotional support vehicle and a kind of fun way, or in some cases the only way, to talk to someone.
AIM and gchat also shared the same delights of purging a brain without an immediate in-person response, but with AIM, you had the creation of a virtual self (an Avatar???? fuck!!!) that sounds like the “real” you without looking like anything other than words on a screen (in 14 pt. Arial font in orange to my crushes, 11 pt. Times New Roman for my real ones). (I wrote the word “screen” right there as “scream” and I didn’t notice for a long time and that tells you a lot about how things be, my friends.)
Or maybe it was never you at all, an invention for that space and only that space, a secret.
Before one could write a nested reply to them, posts on Facebook walls introduced a weird back-and-forth of replying to messages left for you and then answered, a clunky voicemail with your extremely digital camera profile picture taken at Epic Beer Night!!! at Grub’s Inn, blurry and extra small after cropping out some guy from your dorm wearing an XL Polo shirt and doing the shocker.
Add to that a mix of sad-horny MySpace messages, actual emails (dorks only), and even hornier LiveJournal inboxes, and your communication footprint grew exponentially, quickly, beyond what you were capable of just a few short years before. You likely also migrated back to AIM for The College Years. Maybe you started fresh with a new screen name or two, unless you were born very cool with a name like picklejar and not xXx_wr1stbl00d.
By now you also have unlimited texting and maybe a smartphone, so your online chat behavior is in your hands all the time, and there are new rules! Like, don’t text that much! You have direct messaging across a dozen social media platforms, as well as international text and video chat apps, and Facebook messaging, the most cursed of online chat apps, as well as good old-fashioned, dorks-only email, keeper of the most terrifying horror movie of a way to say “hello” (in a subject line, no punctuation, no preview text).
AIM taught its users to speak through a persona, agonizing over what a “hey” and choice of font meant, and illustrating words in ways that talking in person or over the phone couldn’t really do. (I now have several active text threads and messaging threads in an array of voices, whether it’s serious and academic and thinky or ironic goofball dumb guy, sometimes or often in the same block of text.) Those early avatars offered a veil for lethal teenage emotions or a megaphone for them, muted or amplified until they resembled something so disconnected from what I actually felt; I had disassociated completely from the person they were coming from — a lonely, frustrated, isolated young person, not unlike the one trying to talk to my friends in the middle of their workday.
Slack — the foul app, the businessman’s beast — thankfully migrated work-related gchatting to its own whirlpool of “did you get this” and “can you do that” and hideous epic bacon gifs that invaded your precious GMail interface. And Google decided, hey, fuck it, we’ll do that too.
Last year, the company announced Hangouts Chat, another messaging thing built for the kinds of workplaces where people don’t actually talk and think email is annoying. Later this year, Hangouts “classic” will be phased out and rolled into the new Hangouts Chat (not to be confused with its original Chat or gchat as we know it), with the “classic” platform (Google is calling it that, despite it being more popular, to make it sound old and broken) likely shutting down around 2020.
Gchatting will then look a lot more like workplace communication, and vice versa, because in The Shitty and Real Version of The Matrix you can never not be working or talking about work or within reach of your employer at any given moment. More on that later in this ~bLoG~, probably. I like postcards.
An incomplete list of my AIM screen names, which I changed with regularity because my teen identity depended on Total Destruction of my past self.
dirk1775 (1997-1998) — My mom’s email had the numbers 1775, so I thought it would be cool to have them, too, because I am tender.
hurley6621 (1998-2000) — The numbers didn’t mean anything, and I thought it rolled off the tongue in a sophisticated kind of way; the surf-lifestyle brand was my way of saying I only wore board shorts.
drteethrocknroll (2000-2005) — Just some no-frills Muppet worship from a teen boy whose classmates wanted to kill him with their trucks.