Tag Archives: AOL Instant Messenger

Growing Up With the Internet as a Millennial vs Gen-Z

I recently listened to a podcast with Zoomers talking about their experience of growing up with the internet as they came of age. It made me realize how different things were for my generation, the Millennials. Your “coming of age” years are when you transition from childhood into adulthood, roughly from middle school through high school and college. Those years are enormously influential on your development, as the core experiences during that period influence the type of person you will ultimately become for the rest of your life. I came of age during the 1990s and early 2000s, whereas Gen-Z came of age in the 2010s and early 2020s. The year 2005 does not seem that long ago, but in many ways the world then is unrecognizable to the world young people face today—at least online.

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90s AIM vs Current Social Media

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.

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Pseudonymity Makes People More Honest

There is a misconception that anonymity on the internet inevitably leads to toxicity. But pre-Facebook and social media, most people on the internet were anonymous. Or more precisely, they were pseudonymous, meaning they used a continuous username and avatar, but that name/image was not tied to their real-life identity. In the 1990s and early 2000s it seemed absurd to reveal your real name/face online. Yet under that pseudonymous internet, on average, people were more honest and cordial than they are today when everyone posts under their real names. Contrary to intuition, there was less toxicity when more people were anonymous.

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