Away Messages

The art form of our generation

By Mina Hoffman
Graphics Editor

“I’ll admit it, I’m a totally compulsive away message checker,” one drunken student recently confessed to me. She wasn’t the first person I’ve heard admit this, nor anywhere near the last. “Multiple times daily,” she continued. “I get really mad when people don’t change theirs.”

Few would disagree that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and its rival programs have transcended the boundaries of fad and joined the communication establishment. They are particularly prevalent on college campuses, including the 5Cs. For some, they are a time-wasting chat tool- for others, an addiction.

IM-fetishism has not only sped-up a shift from voice-based to text-based communication (free software gets around fast), but further blurred an already fuzzy line between public and private space, changed social politics (particularly in the realm of gossip—as in, you can’t deny hard, textual evidence), and added font preferences, buddy icons, and most importantly, away messages, to an evolving species of individualizing mechanisms (think facebook profiles and cell phone ringtones).

An away message is the IM equivalent of a telephone answering machine—it pops up when the person being messaged isn’t available to reply. AIM offers a default “I am away from my computer right now,” but users can personalize and update their messages. This is where the fun starts.

What started with terse expressions of mood, location, or plans, e.g. “Class ‘til 5, then dinner with my homies,” quickly blossomed to include party announcements, quotes, jokes, obscurely coded, elaborate, deeper (maybe) meanings, and pretty much anything else that falls into the under-1024-characters category.

The practice of posting and checking personalized away messages has become such an obsession that some undergrads have based research projects on them. Ryan Farley and Nick Gray, two students at Wake Forest University, designed software to simplify the process as part of a senior project. Their Buddy Gopher (www.buddygopher.com) program is free, and allows AIM users to check all their buddies’ away messages at once, as well as view a week’s worth of a buddy’s previous messages. Most students don’t even bathe that devoutly.         

An undergraduate survey conducted by students at Haverford College found that a third of respondents (their fellow students) reported checking away messages more than seven times a day. This isn’t particularly surprising, considering the tendency of students to, as one Mudder put it, “live within a 12-foot circle of our laptops.

“We read and write our away messages like it’s a hobby,” said one Pomona freshman. Another student (not entirely in jest) said, “Away messages are my life. They are the best procrastination tool ever invented.”

It’s not just the away messages that students are obsessing over, though; it’s the IMs themselves. A Scripps student commented (over IM, incidentally), “well, I am often a trifle inept with friends on the phone, and typing banter is a bit easier and way less awkward than trying to verbalize it. On the other hand, it is pretty effing impersonal, but it’s better than not communicating.”

In addition to chatting with on-campus peers, many agree that IMing has enabled them to maintain contact with “people from home, despite the fact that they are hundreds of miles away.” One Pitzer student, less enthralled by away messages than others, listed keeping in touch with “close friends, despite all of us being at various colleges across the country” as his only reason for “downloading that stupid program.” This same student said, “it’s not that away messages are a bad idea, everyone just has really lame ones. It seems like almost all of them are Bright Eyes quotes.” Clearly, away message-interest varies from student to student, but more often than not, interest is piqued much of the time.

A Scripps student said, “Away messages are a sample of your personality so that while you’re away your friends don’t have to go through withdrawal.” James Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers University, made a similar observation, theorizing that away messages enable students to shape the way they are perceived “in a very deliberate way.” Tailored to a select audience of IM pals, they “allow people to accomplish two things at once—to have that self-expression and compare that self-expression with other people.” Last week’s self-expressions included:         

Sometimes i look at the Grey Goose bottle and think- damn, i wish it was Thursday (11:20 p.m.)

Crushed yet again, Rocco decides to wear his kidney on his sleeve for a change. (2:15 a.m.)

At lunch. (3:06 a.m.)

Anybody have a red bandana i can borrow for thursday?  or leather pants? (2:43 p.m.)

My uterus hates me. (5 p.m.)

 the deluxe transitive vampire and leopold bloom are conspiring against my weekend (10:57 a.m.)

Fly fishing in Alaska (1 a.m.)  

i am in love with a comparative politics prof, i want to have his babies (4:05 p.m.)

Rhode Island. Its neither a road, nor an island. Discuss. (10:15 p.m)