Journeys in Learning Beyond the Classroom

 

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May 25, 2003

The Message?
Your Children Sure Get It
By SUSAN WARNER

S the end of the school year approaches, teenagers and their parents across the length and breadth of the state know that summer - at least for those not going away to camp with a laptop - will bring one thing:

Bluuup! Instant messaging.

An entire summer of exchanges like this:

"howdy"

" 'sup?" (what's up?)

"nm" (not much)

"u?" (and you?)

"jc" (just chilling)

"g2g" (got to go)

"bb" (bye-bye)

This is instant messaging, otherwise known as I.M., a potent combination of technology, hormones and teenage and pre-teenage defiance - punctuated by smiley faces and frowns. And it has become a social force.

"Indeed, it is a huge monster that's been invited into the household that gobbles up the time and the life-force of young people," said James Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers University. "It becomes as important as breathing. I see the same behaviors on the part of young people as addicts undergoing withdrawal if they don't get access to I.M."

The phenomenon of instant messaging, which has been building for years, is nationwide. Though AOL, the nation's largest provider of the service, does not break down its 195 million regular users by location, New Jersey is prime territory. After all, according to the American Electronics Association, the state ranks 13th in household computer penetration and 5th in high-speed broadband Internet connections.

"New Jersey would have to be in the top percent of I.M. usage," Professor Katz said. "Moreover, N.J. schools have been very successful in encouraging computer use - even in kindergarten. Keyboarding is a part of the New Jersey culture of young people."

The sprawling suburban geography of New Jersey also fuels instant messaging as a way for teenagers and pre-teenagers who are isolated on one-acre zoned development tracts to interact, if only virtually.

"In a state that could be called the play-date capital of the world - where there are no sidewalks - children lose their control over their ability to interact spontaneously if the adults aren't organizing things," said Maurice J. Elias, a professor of psychology at Rutgers and co-author of "Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers."

For many, instant messaging is a harmless form of chitchat, today's version of the Princess phone that was once used to replay the day's events, no matter how mundane, to the consternation of parents. For shy, awkward teens - which is just about all of them - instant messaging can be a way to communicate with confidence.

But to hear the police and school officials tell it, instant messaging can also have undesirable consequences. School administrators say, for instance, that though instant messaging is screened out at schools, its hour-upon-hour use at home generates cliquish, hurtful attacks on children that disrupt social harmony at school.

'A Huge Trend'

"This is a huge trend," said John Hrevnack, principal of the Old York School in Branchburg, where half of the 500 third- and fourth-graders say they use instant messaging. "What happens on line, even if it is at home, can spill over into the schools."

What's more, law enforcement officials estimate that 100 cases a month involve terroristic threats to schools or school-age youths over the Internet - much of it instant messaging - said Richard Brown, deputy sergeant in the high-technology crime unit of the State Police.

Parry Aftab, a Bergen County lawyer who specializes in cyberspace and who founded WiredKids, an online child-safety organization, says that 14 to 20 percent of all teenagers in New Jersey have at one time agreed to meet someone they met on line.

"Almost every case that I'm aware of in the U.S. where sexual predators are communicating with kids for an off-line meeting they have used instant messaging," Ms. Aftab said. "The reason is because it's instant. They don't have to wait and worry parents will read it later on."

Responding to those concerns, Derick Mains, a spokesman for AOL - the largest provider of the service with about 2 billion messages bouncing back and forth each day - said his company recommended that parents monitor its use."

Setting expectations, guidelines and a parent's personal involvement - including moving the computer to the kitchen or family room - are the best safeguards," Mr. Mains said.

Erica Hersh, 14, of South Orange, has been using instant messaging since she was 11. She spends about two hours a day on line, usually in the evening after she and her friends are home from after-school activities and finished with homework.

"It's gotten more and more popular," Erica said. "Everybody has it."

In her case, she said she had 180 people on her buddy list. "What's good about it is you can talk to more than one person at once, and it lets you talk to people you don't know well enough to call," she said. E-mail, she explained, falls between the phone and instant messaging in communications formality.

A user can talk to more than one person at a time while instant messaging and can message while doing other things. Miss Hersh sometimes does homework, talks on the phone and listens to music while her instant messaging screen is up. "I like to multitask," she said.

Her mother, Lori Hersh, was so taken with the power that instant messaging had over her daughter that she made the phenomenon the subject of her master's thesis in speech pathology at Kean University.

Today, Ms. Hersh said, teenagers are multiliterate, communicating through traditional language as well as CD-ROM's, video games and digital cameras. "They are using all of this," she said. "It is normal for them. It's not just reading and writing anymore."

In fact, instant messaging has become an unofficial dialect, and devising misspelled versions of words lacking as many vowels as possible has become a literary form.

To determine if I.M.-speak is seeping into real life, Ms. Hersh surveyed 22 students in New Jersey ages 13 to 14; she found no difference in the grammatical skills of youths who used the Internet less than 2 hours a week and those who used it more than 10. But that could change, she warned, as children begin to use I.M. lingo before they are fully grounded in formal language.

To Robert Kubey, director of the center for media studies at Rutgers, it is precisely the casual and immediate nature of instant messaging that is a strong attraction to youths, allowing them to see who is on line before approaching them.

"Your buddy list has told you that they're also on line, so they're in the neighborhood," Professor Kubey said. "They're walking by and you're on the street corner and you're just saying, 'Hi.' "

Many Parents Are Clueless

And then there is the parental angst, and cluelessness, about instant messaging that makes it all the more important as a foundation for building teenage identity, he said. Teenagers delight, for example, in slipping the code "pos" into messages written right before the eyes of a snoopy parent unaware that it stands for "parent over shoulder."

"The more your parents don't like it, the more cool it is," Professor Kubey said.

Instant messaging is also harder for parents to monitor than earlier forms of teenage communication, he said. Mothers and fathers would certainly notice a one-hour phone call from New Jersey to California but might be unable to detect an instant messaging cross-country conversation of 3 hours, or 30 hours.

Professor Elias, of Rutgers, also says that endless hours of instant messaging can become an audiovisual form of avoidance, similar to drugs or alcohol.

"If you are I.M.-ing with seven people for hours, you really can't think about how lousy your home life might be or how disappointed you are in your parents or how you don't want to go to summer school," he said.

More important, instant messaging is changing the nature of human communication. "Children now are becoming, in some cases, hesitant to engage in the give-and-take of everyday life," he said, "because it's easier and cleaner to just instant message."

That detachment, along with instant messaging's technological reach, is ramping up traditional teenage tribal warfare to a level of savagery that makes the slam-books of the 1950's and 60's look quaint.

Pam Friedman, a technology instructor at the Old York School, who has three teenage children, says elementary school children use the service for idle, usually harmless, chat, while high school students avail themselves of it largely to make plans, coordinate school projects or perhaps engage in more thoughtful conversations.

The problem, Mrs. Friedman said, comes in the middle years, when instant messaging is often used as a blunt instrument for social terror. "It can get really nasty and vicious," she said.

As an example, she offered her 11-year-old niece, Liat Zabludovsky, of Springfield, who quarreled with another girl - over what she does not remember - and tried to make up by instant messaging.

"She said she didn't care because she was mad at me, and so we got into a bigger fight," Liat said. "It wasn't very helpful that we would talk on line because it would just get worse. When you're talking on line you can't see any reaction so you might say the wrong thing."

Her mother, Linda Kiesel-Zabludovsky, put it like this: "If you're on the playground and you say to a kid, 'You're fat and ugly,' two weeks later you can all forget about it. But these kids save their I.M.'s. They not only save them, they cut and paste them and print them. It stays forever. If you say something mean, you can't take it back."

Despite the pitfalls, Ms. Kiesel-Zabludovsky said she found instant messaging a useful way to communicate with her older daughter during her first year at college. The impersonal typing sapped their conversations of emotion.

"No one could say, 'Don't give me that attitude,' " she said. "So it has its good points along with its bad."

As for the bad points, Ms. Aftab, the lawyer in Bergen County, explained how a niece of hers was set up as the victim of an I.M. "notify" war. In this type of attack, an instant messenger coaxes a victim into using bad language or otherwise violating unwritten codes of conduct. The attacker then notifies the victim's I.M. provider - be it AOL or Yahoo - which quickly revokes the victim's on-line privileges.

Her niece was eventually cleared after her father - using special software to retrace the conversation - showed that she had been set up.

Beyond the psychological injury, Ms. Aftab said she had bigger worries about instant messaging. Not wanting to miss a beat, she said, teenagers often leave a cell phone number on their I.M. away message, giving predators another foot in the door.

"They send a cute picture of a 14-year-old boy," Ms. Aftab said. "It's just that it's not them. Or maybe it was them a long, long time ago."

Ms. Aftab added that on-line predators frequently mention they have a connection to the teenage idol Justin Timberlake, in the same way they use the promise of a puppy to lure younger children.

Victims of sexual predators among users of instant messaging fall into two camps, she said. One is typically a lonely girl who is flattered by the attention and agrees to meet someone she thinks is a cute 14-year-old boy. When he turns out to be 25 or 45, the girl is disappointed but still connects, Ms. Aftab said. The other is a super achiever who agrees to meet as an adventure.

Why Allow It?

With all that to worry about, why would any parent let a child engage in instant messaging? The first argument most children make is that they need to discuss homework projects to improve their grades.

"They know that academic achievement is a bone for which the parent will jump very high," Professor Katz said.

Then there is the enduring power of peer pressure that transcends generations. "One of the most painful things for a parent is to see their child rejected," he said, "and to think there's this whole happy world that they're not letting their kids engage in."

Finally, many parents, exhausted by a long day at work and a grueling commute, are only too happy to have their child home and within earshot but otherwise engaged, he said. Not that parents are powerless.

"The computer is something that you can control as a parent just like the television," Professor Elias said. "There's no divine right to watch television, and there is no divine right to use the computer as much as a child wants to. Parents have to decide on a proper balance."

Mr. Hrevnack, the principal in Branchburg, said some problems that teenagers are having with instant messaging may decline because children in younger grades are now getting more formal education about the problems of a form of technology that their older brothers and sisters were left to discover on their own.

"They've all ended up with spammed porn," Ms. Aftab said. "They've seen the bullying games and most of the time they're good at abusing others. What we need to do is recognize that kids are going to use it, and for the most part they just need some education. It comes down to parenting, not technology."