I came across this article in Arts & Letters Daily (one of the best sites out there, in my opinion). The article has to do with AOL’s “dirty chatting” appeal (the dark secret of squeaky-clean AOL), and how the merger with Time Warner has screwed up the very thing which made AOL so much fun, a guilty pleasure. Now this is a spin on things I have not heard before! I am extremely interested in what is happening with AOL at the moment, since it directly affects my job, so I have read every spin, every puff piece, every WSJ article about what is going on, but this is the first article I’ve read which focuses on AOL’s main attraction: the ability of its members to “hook up” in an online fashion. This is the underbelly of AOL.
A couple quotes:
Not only did AOL have better technology, it had what nobody could reproduce without great luck and limitless money, which was a critical-mass audience — chat doesn’t work unless, at every moment of the day, you have loads of chatters. Across the Internet, there were lonely chat rooms (where the chat function didn’t really work, anyway) and, at AOL, rowdy and randy crowds (“Are you hot?” “Yeah! What are you wearing?”).
Meanwhile, the AOL guys were refining their story. A great American brand could not appear to be in the sex business. So what AOL focused on was getting the dirty-talk audience to buy things. From sex to commerce was the conversion it was attempting (this is the conversion that cable television managed with infomercials in the mid-eighties). Certainly, Time Warner believed in conversion (the people at AOL used the word community as a euphemism, but the people at Time Warner used the word for real — as though imagining little shops and churches and schools).
Conversion from sex to commerce. Conversion from anything to commerce is the Holy Grail of the Internet! It’s a pipe dream now, unless you’re Amazon.
And here’s the rub:
Everybody with any speed is locating and targeting and qualifying possible mates with great ease in well-designed, mall-like settings, while back at AOL, it’s still a creepy, anonymous, low-class world (AOL’s weird censorship policies, in an increasingly tolerant world, somehow seem to add an extra measure of tawdriness). Or, in a high-speed world, you and your friends are merely using the AIM applet, effectively cutting AOL out of the transaction.
It’s a demographic nightmare: If you are still signing on to AOL to chat, there is, ipso facto, something wrong with you.
This will mean nothing to people who don’t care about AOL, who haven’t been involved in AOL for years, who have no interest in what is going wrong with the company. But I read this and thought: YES. This is exactly IT.
