In the late 1990s, AOL instant messenger (AIM) was the first social network I used, and it is still my favorite form of social media. What was different about AIM is that it was more social, whereas modern social media is more parasocial.

On AIM you chatted directly to other people—individually. You could also create chatrooms with multiple people, but the majority of communication on AIM, at least for me, was one-on-one with people I already knew IRL¹ (classmates from school). You might have several chats going on at once with different people, but each chat was a private single person-to-person conversation. Then you could put up an away message that served as a proto-tweet that was visible to all your followers—or “buddies” as they were called.

X/Twitter is similar to AIM in that it is text-based with limited characters. But Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other modern social media basically inverts the dynamic of AIM so that the primary form of communication is the broad “away message” type of post that is visible, not just to all your followers, but to everyone on the entire platform. This is a form of indirect communication or parasocial interaction where you’re not speaking to anyone specifically, but just putting a message out into the ether for anyone to hear.

Of course people on modern social media platforms can have direct messages with individuals where they have private communications, which is more social and more fulfilling. But this is rarer than the indirect public post. The default method of communication on modern social media has been inverted. AIM was primarily individual, one-on-one, more intimate, private, and socially fulfilling communication. Modern social media is primarily general, indirect, less intimate, public, parasocial, superficial, and socially unfulfilling communication.

I think we would all benefit by returning to the 90s form of social media where most of our internet communication is private DMs. Save the broad public posts as a rare supplement to that. Some platforms such as Discord have started to embrace this. Public social media might be a good way to find potential friends online, but true friendship is formed in private chats. Though even that is limited, of course. The most intimate relationships can only be developed in person.

When posts are public they become performance. Whereas private communication is more honest. You are willing to look bad or be wrong (or change your mind) because no one will screenshot your post years later to humiliate and/or cancel you. My old AIM convos are completely lost to history. Decades later, I would like to revisit some chats for nostalgia’s sake, but that data is probably better left buried, only existing in the rose-colored tint of my memory. Most tweets being preserved in the Library of Congress should be forgotten to time as well.

1. IRL = “in real life”. Acronyms such as this, LOL, and BRB were invented on AIM. ↩︎