1990s chat rooms set stage for today

Welcome to Internet Nostalgia Days, a celebration of the lives we have all lived online, Sadaf Ahsan writes:

By the time I was about 12 years old, it quickly became apparent that there was an entire world of social interaction happening r i ght under my nose — on the Internet. Like an elementary classroom secret, this online world began to spread.

I soon discovered the Internet was not just a place to cut and paste * NSYNC collages and illegally download Aaron Carter songs ( something I was ashamed of even then). It was a place where you could congregate after school and chat with your friends about your other friends and about cute boys and rant about your parents and rave about whatever salacious soap opera you just watched.

Chat rooms were texting before texting. Chat rooms — from AOL’s Instant Messenger (which boasted thousands of rooms) to Yahoo! Messenger — were hotbeds of early social networking. No matter what age, gender, sexuality or interest, there was a place for you, be it a room for Nickelback uberfans or My Little Pony collectors.

While chat rooms still exist, they have a much seedier reputation now, thanks to the advent of To Catch a Predator and Chris Hansen (“Why don’t you take a seat over there?”). This was the 1990s, before firewalls and parental controls. By the early 2000s, parents became aware of cyberbullies and sexual predators, and how the Internet isn’t all that different from the playground.

Chat rooms are no longer the trendy Internet thing to do, thanks to a plethora of social networking platforms that offer far less obscurity and are based on con- necting real life identities. If the chat rooms of the ’ 90s offered anything, it was 100 per cent anonymity. No one could give your embarrassing screen- name a google and instantly find you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. There was no Internet footprint, which meant you felt completely safe and could be whoever you wanted to be.

A language was born in chat rooms: omg, lol, brb and, my personal favourite, which has lost its popularity today —A/ S/ L ( age/sex/ location). Forget saying hello, you could pop into any room, type “A/S/ L” and that was you, at least for however long you were logged in. You could show off your supercool taste i n music with lyrics in your signature and emoticons peppering your threads.

Without t he f ear and trepidation of a face- to- face interaction, each day around 4 p.m. until your dial-up connection kicked you off, you could talk to your crush on MSN Messenger with only a monitor between you. Entire romances lived and died in those square boxes, some going all the way from a simple A/S/ L intro to cybersex. It was where we learned how to speak to our crushes, how to flirt, how to find out who “like, liked” whom. We’d overanalyze every conversation the next day in school between math class and social studies.

In this way, chat rooms became learning tools for a world where there were far more options — a coup for IRL wallflowers — for how we speak to each other now.

They laid the foundation for online dating, texting and social networking, but with a layer of innocence. We were on the cusp of discovering not just a new technology, but each other i n new ways. They were high school online, with the bonus of being able to log on and off. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but in a preFacebook world, it was free and undiscovered. And for our preteen selves, that was priceless.