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N-Gen: Teenagers talk only to those they know Originally Published in The Vancouver Sun, November 1998  The teenagers type at lightning speed. Windows on their computer screens snap open and closed as they hold as many as five one-on-one online conversations at a time. In the same moment they are reading, composing, sending and receiving. Greetings, gossip, jokes and exaggerated claims are electronically exchanged through the text that flows across the screen with the same ease as speech. The action is raw and frantic, sweet and unrehearsed. I still find it a sight beautiful to behold. And yet, in the two years I've spend studying ways in which teenagers and students use the Internet, build online communities and communicate, it has become a lot less interesting to me. These days, most new media writers talk about the potential for community building on-line. Certainly, where teenagers are concerned, the Net is one big party. But what disturbs me is this: A year ago the majority of kids online were using the Net to build alternative communities -- ones based on mutual interests, on gaming, or even something as simple as the unique variations that are the shared experience of being young in an adult world. Over the past six months, however, the face of community-building among teenagers online has started to change. And this new face is a very familiar one indeed. A year ago I rarely met teens whose online communications were cautious and limited to only a few friends or relatives who were also online. There were many more whose adventurous habits were inspired as a result of a broken leg or a more permanent kind of physical barrier. I also met kids who were using the Internet to pursue dreams, build businesses, define friendships across cultures and to satisfy certain curiosities about the world at large and, more specifically, about the opposite sex. They were all trying out roles, rehearsing social situations and learning how to live in the world not as who they were, but as who they hoped to become. It was every theory of child development in action. This summer I started to meet teenage newbies (people online for fewer than six months) who had never encountered anyone on the Internet that they hadn't already met face to face. Instead, they had "buddy lists," a set collection of contacts, familiar folk with whom they could communicate when both were online at the same time via Instant Messages or the popular ICQ program from Mirabilis. ICQ is like combining the qualities of e-mail with Internet relay chat - except that users build a contact list and communicate with only those people "It has a much friendlier interface that makes it easy to see why it would appeal to newbies," explains Robin Pearson, 18. When it's switched on, ICQ notifies those members of the contact list who are online that you're available to talk to them. Then message windows from those contacts pop up on the screen and can be immediately responded to. Layer upon layer of messaging windows can be opened, enabling several one-on-one conversations to happen almost simultaneously. Teens often compare it to holding several telephone conversations at once. All the kids I met this summer loved the tool, which should come as no surprise since ICQ is a tool even hardcore geeks love. "I have friends who call ICQ the crack pipe because it's so much fun and so addictive," says Stacy King, a writer for the hip, hyped Toronto Internet company Digital Renaissance. But there was something missing from the online life of these newbies: Internet experience that differentiated them from the enthusiastic new users I'd met only the year before. Their buddy lists were filled with the objects of vacation flirtations, distant relatives, people who attended the old elementary school, and those friends who they'd gone to the mall with that very day. There were no Japanese, Israeli or Icelandic e-pals (like pen pals except electronic), there were no out-of-province members of fan clubs or members of "stupid parent" support groups. These newbies thought that using the Internet to speak to strangers was weird. Some of them talked about safety concerns, but no one would say that they'd adopted a "don't-talk-to-strangers" policy to protect themselves. Many of them just didn't see the point in trying out other ways of online communication. Many newbies see IRC as difficult. At the same time, e-mail isn't immediate and its efficient usage is often inhibited by spammers. It's also true that many teens-only and kids-safe web environments are still using old applications like HTML-based chat because it offers greater control to chat monitors and greater safety in the eyes of teachers and parents. But more disturbing is this growing sense among teens that communicating on the Net is just like using the telephone. There isn't the same quest for obscure information or the same desire to end the limits of physical distance that the early adopters of this new technology seemed to embrace. What I hope this column will do is spotlight those young people who get beyond the buddy list. I hope these kids will let us know what they have discovered not just about technology, but about the Netizens who have gathered essential information and shared their experiences with Web users of all ages. I hope they will remind us that talking to strangers is sometimes a great way to learn.
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Big Brother is Over, Make Way for Big Sister: Teens on the Net
N-Gen: Teenagers talk only to those they know
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