I'm an autistic millenial. Like other people my age, I grew up in the internet of the late 90s and the early 2000s. I grew up on forums and reading blogs. I grew up with it being a big deal who had dial up and who didn't. I grew up around y2k. And I grew up with AIM.
I grew up in the time of AIM. And sure, AIM wasn't the only messanging program around, or the only messanger I used. I had AIM and MSN messanger and skype's text chat, and chatrooms associated with forums, and found my way to IRC. But I grew up with AIM; I grew up on AIM.
Because AIM was what everyone had, and in many ways AIM defined this time. If you didn't have an AIM account you were ostrocized, whether it was by people who'd bully you for everything, or friends still being why are you so weird. It was expected. And it was text chat.
I grew up in a time where a text chat was was the cool thing to do, it was the expected thing to do for completely everyone, as everyone moved online, and was finding ways to keep contact with friends. It was easy, it was convinient, and it was something that didn't make you stand out. Typing, text, things that weren't speaking weren't disability things, they were everyone.
And me? Who didn't get IM accounts for the longest time because I didn't understand why you'd want to have real time conversations if you weren't forced. Because I didn't want to deal with needing to process all of those things even more. What it did for me when I was dragged into this socializing, was being, this is something I can do when I didn't realize anything would be doable.
But I grew up in the time of AIM. And that meant that my learning and discovering how to communicate in text, and that I could communicate in text, and that it was possible to do things I didn't know was possible, was socially acceptable. It was expected, it was something you were supposed to do to have conversations in these instant messaging programs. If you did otherwise you were the weird one. I was able to figure out what I needed - but without social stigma of this discovery process. I was able to figure out what I needed - and with things being provided to me to search and try, and explore. I wasn't stigmatized for the discovery process of maybe I can actually communicate if you give me the ability to type.
I grew up on AIM, so this was what everyone was doing, whether they needed it for disability or not. In those early years it wasn't the slightest bit out of place, when it would have been seen more strange for not having an instant messaging account than for typing to friends when we were next to each other.
And yes, these times, where we talk about older generations calling and younger generations texting. Where we talk about the first generations of people growing up online and teens living on social media rather than on the phone as teens. They're talked about a lot in terms of differences in communication in general, but it's also worth thinking about these in terms of progress in terms of non-speech communication, in terms of what is normalized.
In some ways, the first AAC I used was AIM. I would send messages to people sitting next to me becuase I needed some way to speak when I couldn't. I pieced what I could do together using the internet. And in other ways, nobody thought this was weird, I wasn't some odd disabled person. My communication wasn't stigmatized. They didn't notice I couldn't speak. They were choosing to type too.
