In what ways do you communicate online?

In my heart, there will always be three critical moments of online communication that shaped my life: ICQ, Deadjournal, and Tribe.

In the years since these things came and went, things have changed — we’ve moved on from longform to tweets. Then twitter imploded. Facebook was an amazing way to keep up with friends and family, until it wasn’t. For awhile Instagram was king, with all the photos, and now we’ve moved on to videos.

I hate videos. I’ve tried posting a few. There are old Youtube videos of me playing guitar or reading poetry. But it always felt forced. I love writing for one specific reason: asynchronous communication. I don’t want to get closer and closer to real time until we’re all livestreaming our entire lives. I want curation. I want an online space where things slow down instead of speed up. I feel like I’m in the minority.

ICQ

“Uh-oh” the little flower blips on the side of my screen. And uh-oh, indeed. Before ICQ, my communication was limited to letters. I sent letters to my cousin. She sent me hints at queerness. The name Ani Difranco. Tori Amos. I had to go and find the music myself. I mailed long confessions of my self to childhood friends, and we watched each other grow up on paper. Until the internet came and… instead of finding each other, we simply drifted to easier and more immediate conversations.

Enter ICQ. I was a senior in high school, with my own computer in my room only because there had been a good deal on it, and I would need one for university the next year. I spent countless nights up late, chatting with strangers. The conversations never went deep. They always went sexual. It was a frenzy of hormones. Looking back, I’m horrified. I say I would never let my kids do that. (I find out my kids found their own versions of these hyper-sexualized chats. Thanks, Viber). I wonder if my parents had any idea.

At first, ICQ was an amazing adventure. A quiet, shy girl who couldn’t talk to people she was attracted to in real life could express herself as a sexual being without fear of rejection. There was never rejection, because there were no people. There were only typing bubbles that consisted of A/S/L. No photos. Fake names. Just hints of imagination. Online, everything was yes. I was able to explore fantasy. I was able to put into words the feelings racing through my hormonal body. It was beyond exciting. It was addicting.

Then it came offline. My first time having sex, I was saying no. And the young man wasn’t hearing it. There had been so many fantasies online. How could I possibly say no? That no didn’t work. Welcome to your defined sexuality, have fun working through that the rest of your life. Yeah, ICQ was a bad idea.

I went back to email. Typed letters delivered instantly. They were more convenient than buying stamps and waiting for weeks, but they had no romance. They were safer than chatrooms with strangers, but they felt sterile. They worked, and nothing more.

Deadjournal

My first year of college, everyone had livejournal or deadjournal. Being a budding alt girl, I went dead. If only we knew in the early 2000s that dark themes weren’t as meaningful as we thought. Maybe the popular kids were on myspace, or maybe that was a different era. All I knew is I could spill my heart out and people would read it. The people who read it? Usually ones who had crushes on me. It was another form of flirtation — the same oversharing as ICQ — but this time open for the world to read and couched in painfully obvious metaphors. Secret code.

“I went out with a group of friends. I really like one.” What followed was akin to a logic puzzle to figure out if you, dear reader, are sending my hormones racing. (Hint, if you’re reading this, it’s most likely you). Attraction was never as sophisticated as our young adult brains thought it was.

But beyond the secret codes, there was another type of oversharing going on. Enter: screaming into the void. I’d written words since I was a child. I’d written stories. Journals. Diaries. I filled books and books with my words. And now, there was a way for me to share them with others. I wanted others to stumble across me. I wanted them to read me. See me. Know me. I shared everything. Every pain and excitement. Confusion and frustration. It was all out there. For someone to recognize and love me.

The truth: few people read it. No one loved me. (Well, except maybe Josh? Probably Josh.) I drifted away from groups of friends who overshared in writing and into friends who overshared in other ways. Then into friends who under shared. Then into colleagues that didn’t share at all.

Being an adult is a lonely life.

Tribe

Tribe was my first step into “adult” online communication. For the first time, online communication was not my screaming id begging to be seen and heard. It was about sharing information and experiences. Yes, we used Tribe to plan events, but we also used it to build community. Posts went beyond logistics to intentionality. Next to a thread about who’s bringing the potato salad, you’ll see a thread discussing interactions at various events. How do we navigate consent? How do we build authenticity?

Sure, Tribe had moments of the id breaking through. We used it for casual hookups. We got to know people we were attracted to better. We shared “read me, see me” confessions. But it was so much more than that. It was a moment of true community building.

But, like all good things, tribe died. And then came back, a zombie of its former self. Then died. Then came back. Then died. It might exist again. No one uses it, though. And there’s no community.

Maybe I miss Tribe. And maybe I just miss that magical time in my life when everyone around me seemed obsessed with forming the world into something that was ours instead of curating ourselves into something that fits the commercial world.

“People used to make records,
as in the record of an event,
the event of people playing music
in a room

Now everything is cross marketing.
It’s about sunglasses and shoes,
or guns and drugs.
You choose.”

― Ani DiFranco

The Algorithm

I’m sure there was some amount of curation going on in all of these. But it felt more strongly tied to the real world. We still sent links around. Invites to groups. We searched keywords and we found things that were useful in our lives. The internet was part map of the real world and part secret lair, and each of us were building our own little corner. Then algorithms started feeding us content. Not “check out this stranger’s journal” randomness. But “based on your actions, you might like…”

Facebook became less about friends and family. Instagram became less about the self and more about the $. EVERYTHING became more about the $. Pay with your attention. Get paid to click. Get paid to create. Pay to click. Pay to have more control over what you see. Pay to see anything. Pay to post anything. Instead of a slot machine of connection, it became a slot machine for monetization.

No more, “see me”. Instead, “see yourself in this…”

Yeah, I know. I sound like a grumpy old woman. And, in a lot of ways, I am. I constantly feel like online communication could be so much more. We could go deeper into things. We could grow and progress — ourselves and our community. We could be seen. We could see others.

But we don’t.

Communication Now

At the moment, I journal here. Mostly, I share my thoughts on books. Sometimes I share a more personal message like this — I’m not sure why. Left over hiccups of “look at me”? Most likely. Other than that:

• I occasionally give in to rage bait on twitter. I know my life would be better if I just walked away from it completely. And yet… I can’t seem to?
• I post on Instagram, but I can’t figure out the platform well enough to engage meaningfully with others.
• Once a month, I open TikTok, knowing that’s the only place people seem to sell books these days… scroll videos for half an hour, and close it with a confused WTF is this thing feeling.
• Spend way too much time on Discord. In writing groups. Not talking about writing.
• Open Facebook to check in on friends and family. Get distracted by ads for things I don’t need. Buy something from Temu, supporting fast consumerism and killing our planet little by little.

Honestly, if I look back at the experiment of online communication and assessed my life in computers, I would wish I had continued writing letters to my cousin and best friend. Reading books instead of scrolling. Watching movies instead of shorts. My life would be better for it.