Profile Pictures, Away Messages
I used to have really intertextual (a.k.a. plagiarizing pop culture, usually without citing sources) away messages. There was a four year period of my life where I was essentially addicted to AIM (a.k.a high school). I think I’ve got some records of my away messages and conversations on a disc somewhere in Indianapolis. I used highly emotional media references (someone else said it, so that means I’m not alone), most likely from a song or a movie, to help communicate how I was feeling. Obviously, it could be used litterally to say “hey, i’m at the movies, be back later.” But that’s boring. Or, the away message could be used as a screening tool, because people would think you were away. Though, you wouldn’t be shown as idle (which is when your name goes grey and faded on your friends buddy lists). And, in theory you could just use your “profile” to define yourself, the it was much cooler to just be able to hover over someones name and see a short message about them. Overall, away messages were one of the easiest ways to define yourself in a small amount of space. It’s was a truly efficient form of communication, a sort of single serving of you or your friends at any given time. When users “idle” online they tend to leave there away messages up. If you think that you aren’t saying a lot about yourself with your away message then you are blissfully unaware of the reality of the away message. Your away message, especially if it’s calm and cool, or quick and logical, or whatever, communicates a sense of style that actually represents you (i.e. identity). A little snippet of your personality, ideals, emotions, values, even your dialect and culture can be captures in those few words (or sometimes almost a paragraph). Of course, as with all technology, there is a fallacy that it may somehow be more real than another medium. But regardless, it’s the users responsibility to come out of that existential crisis of identity and communicate to their buddy list (that, or realize you don’t have time and instead spend the time doing your homework). Today while on facebook I noticed the 71 people changed their profile pictures.
Profile pictures are simply more efficient at communication than away messages–and given the long way we’ve come sense simple away messages, much less awkward. The twitter phenomenon (if you can call it that even) is essentially what away messages were original meant to do but more to the point. But what would be even better than twitter, is a site that is for profile pictures only. Just about everyone has a cell phone at this point, and almost all cell phones come with cameras and basic editing functions (like sepia tone, black and white, contrast adjustment, cropping, etc.). Perhaps this is the greater message (that cell phones are the next area of progress in communication technology). But, why not have a twitter type service with images instead of words? You could use the facebook network API to do something similar to this already, and that’s my point. The thing about twitter is that it is a medium end in itself, it is a method of commenting on a medium within a medium (in the case of away messages inside of instant message applications with idling capabilities). The point of having a service that did only this would of course be trivial (like twitter is, on the whole, despite a few unique content related services like ‘novels in three lines‘)–it would merely further the obvious fact that images are a language that humans have been moving in preference towards (with some resistance) since the invention of photography. Even better would be video portraits though, like the ones from the newspapers in Harry Potter films–but that might be too much of an uncanny valley.
