Often they consisted of the quotation of vitally important song lyrics: from The Postal Service, from Dashboard Confessional, from blink-182, from Green Day, from The Beatles (only after Across the Universe came out), from RENT and Spring Awakening and The Last Five Years.
They might have a succinct description of our emotional state. “What were they like?” As thunderous piano-accompanied art songs were to the sad young men of Romantic Germany, so were status messages to us. And iconic alert noises played at certain actions: the door-opening squeak when someone logged on, the door-closing click when they logged off, the boodleoop for every new message. (Since we didn’t have smartphones back then, its desktop-delimited-ness was self-explanatory.) You could set lengthy status messages with animated icons in them. It was like Gchat or iMessage, but you could only do it from a desktop computer. But when we invented it, we didn’t have text messages, we didn’t have Snapchat, we didn’t have group chats or Instagram DMs or school-provided Gmail accounts. That thing you know how to do, that cerebellum-wracking attentiveness to every character of the text message and what it might mean- we invented that. We were the first generation to spend two hours typing at our closest friends instead of finishing our homework, parsing and analyzing and worrying over “ u were so funny in class today” or “ nah lol youre pretty cool.” The words and the alert sounds swirl around you and you know how to read them and hear them because our culture-that we made-taught you how. You walk around in habitats of text, pop-up cathedrals of social language whose cornerstone is the rectangle in your pocket.
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