During a recent period of lounging on the couch in my apartment,
I received an instant message from a Daily Bruin editor asking me
an intriguing question.
“Mark,” he said, “can you explain to me why
you, as someone with pretty respectable musical tastes, would have
one of the worst bands of the past decade in your screen
name?”
I’m going to go ahead and assume he was referring to
Incubus, because no one ever catches the other band in my screen
name, “Filtered Incubus.” If you see through my
eighth-grade attempt at being clever and can find the other band
name, well, then you’re already more swift than 98 percent of
the people I know. Anyway, I don’t share his sentiments about
Incubus (though I’m not as high on them as I was), but he did
make me think further about the quirks of college students using
AIM.
If you look at your buddy list (or anyone else’s, for that
matter), there are a few things that you’ll notice. First,
it’s likely that you have had the same screen name for some
time now. Due to the wonder of linked screen names, it’s
easier to switch to new ones these days, but that doesn’t
make lazy college students, myself included, any more inclined to
do so. It’s also extremely likely that the vast majority of
people on your buddy list have a screen name that appears to be
somewhat juvenile and/or not indicative of their current
personality.
There are a few categories that I think nearly everyone’s
screen name falls into.
First and foremost are the band screen names. Based on what they
are, you can tell without any doubt when they were made. A friend
of mine has a screen name with Offspring in it, and I can instantly
tell it’s from 1998 when the “Americana” album
and “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” came out. Other
typical band screen names include rappers (like Busta6969 or
Dreminemchik), song titles and lyrics (like TwoBCome1 for the Spice
Girls fan, though I’d be impressed by some hard core name
like ZigaZigAH or whatever they say in “Wannabe”) and
the digits 182 in honor of the Blink boys. I’d venture to
guess that every single person reading this has at least one screen
name on their buddy list that contains “182.”
Also prevalent are screen names that have something to do with
sports. These can run from typical declarations of team loyalty
(e.g., LakerFan56) to actual descriptions of the user’s
perceived athletic ability like Dunkinbala35 or PuckMasta22. Some
extend this last point and offer up physical descriptions of
themselves, like BigJ455, LilBill65 or ShOrTy2HoTtIe. Typically,
these contain lots of Xs, letters that alternate between being
capitalized and lowercase, and various trendy misspellings.
Chuck Klosterman recently wrote in Spin that there are no such
things as coincidences in sociology, and I think that in this case
I’d tend to agree with him. From a sociological standpoint,
band screen names become the most interesting of all the AIM
handles. Essentially, the laziness of college students allows for a
window into the past of even the most pretentious individual. I
can’t count the number of times I’ve met a
knowledgeable music lover only to find out that their screen name
is something like FreakOnALeash43 or SlimShaydee99.
In many ways, embarrassing musical screen names like this are
great equalizers that keep people grounded and force them to recall
their roots. After all, it’s difficult for someone to make an
obnoxious claim such as listening exclusively to 4-track demos of
The Fall and Sebadoh at the age of 12 when they have a screen name
like, well, Filtered Incubus. Then again, maybe the only reason
that people stick with these embarrassing screen names is because
after spending hours at the AIM Create-A-Screen-Name site
they’re unable to come up with an obscure enough Pavement,
Sonic Youth, or Dinosaur Jr. lyric to use as a new name.
Not that I’ve done that or anything.
If you’re puzzled why Humphrey ever liked Filter,
e-mail him at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu, because he doesn’t
have a clue either.