Heidi’s AIM art themes
Item 1: Art Themes
Art Themes allowing the AIM live chat box to be personalized to represent one’s own personality, hobbies, obsessions, artistic ability or lack there of:
http://www.picgames.com/perl/scat?cat=Art
Using this site along with the two following sites allows anyone to create their own art to express themselves while chatting live with their friends. These are the backgrounds for where the text appears.
Item 2: AIM Art Buddies
Italian gangsta
Art Buddies allows a creative way to personalize smiley faces to suit one’s own personality:
http://www.picgames.com/buddy-icons/buddy-icons.php?cat=Art
These are smiley faces you can send with a variety of different types of faces: sad, mad, kisses, devil horns, etc.
Item 3: AIM Away Art
Combination of key stokes and smiley faces together to create away pictures or away art:
http://www.awayart.com/
Pictures can be Christmas trees, hearts, pumpkins, shooting stars, any holiday generally, bunny angel, etc.
Meaning and Function
These sites offer the capacity to identify oneself electronically without needing a great deal of artistic talent – you just need to click and choose your favorites. The combinations of the three kinds of elements will always create something unique to give a sense of ownership and sense of identity online. In other words, you are not just another username. You have a face; it just lies beneath this beautiful display of what you choose to show. Things that people don’t get to see about us, we get to show through displaying it through our themes and icons and away messages. I think this is an awesome way to show others the other side(s) of us that doesn’t (don’t) always come up in every day conversation. Now we don’t play 20 questions like we used to in grade school, and we don’t know much about our friends, let alone our online friends. This is a way to show our friends a little about ourselves without actually saying anything. It’s like our clothes. We are saying something about ourselves without saying anything at all verbally. These three sites show the online way to do the same thing while communicating instant messaging.