Virginia's away
That’s what my little status said when I got up from the computer.
One click in a dropdown, and everyone on my MSN list knew: not here right now.
And back then, this status was normal. It left the door open. Back in five, or not, we’ll see. Logging off was only when the computer would be shut down (we also did this).
Two kinds of absence, and you picked which one to communicate.
In fact, despite having the actual word “away” next to our name, we started personalizing it. A song lyric, a joke, a little message tossed to our contact list, a word only our circle would know. A small sign of identity even when we were showing that we weren’t in front of the screen.
Then it disappeared (sort of)
Notifications arrive constantly. Emails get answered from the supermarket, from a beach while you’re “out of office”. There’s no logging off, because online stopped being something you go on. It became the background. The default.
And on tools like Slack and Teams, the whole “available/away” status got automated and rebranded. That green dot turned into an online punch card (your presence corporatized in the form of a dot).
And now, “away” makes its comeback
For the first time in years, being unavailable is becoming visible, again.
There’s the whole “online is dead” (rolling eyes), “touch grass” (more rolling), “we’re so back to real life” (🫠) talk that has been turning offline into a service, and a luxury one. Digital detox retreats, hotels selling the absence of wifi as a perk…
But this isn’t the death of anything.
Set aside the retreats, the business of switching off, for a second.
With MSN back in the day we rewrote that little status because it was a piece of who we were. We now announce our detox or our content diet or how we customize our phones for the same reason. Telling people how we’re here, or how we’re not.
It’s identity. Online and offline.
We’re just relearning how to step out, with different tools.
Until the next scroll,
V
P.S. The UX link is right here, don’t doubt it. That MSN status was a piece of microcopy, a functional little label that later turned into behavior, into something bigger than “away”.
