This is the generation that will drive demand soon. What we old f**ts want or need does not matter. Gottfried
washingtonpost.com
Middle Schoolers, Letting Their Fingers Do the Talking
By Ellen Edwards
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 14, 2003; Page C01
A shy 10-year-old girl who has trouble talking face-to-face with other kids has dozens of online friends and spends hours every day sending them instant messages.
A 10-year-old boy communicates with his cousins across the country through regular IMs, never even considering a phone call.
An 11-year-old girl, looking for a friend to take to the movies, goes first to the computer to see who's free, and only later -- reluctantly -- agrees to pick up the phone to find someone.
Parents of children this age say they have been waiting for their preteens to talk over the phone line and buzz away, but it's not happening and it looks as if it may not happen at all.
The land line, it seems, is just so last century.
In what may be a permanent shift, kids are communicating online rather than by phone. And as they get older, when they do use the phone, it's more likely to be a cell, and even that may be for text messaging rather than talking.
"I'm absolutely certain instant messages will have a profound effect on relationships," says Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen. "I just don't know what it will be. I think it will be as great or maybe greater than the invention of the telephone."
Maybe you already know this. Maybe it has happened in your house. If you have a preteen, it may just be happening now.
"The phone never rings in our home," says Gary Knell, the president and CEO of Sesame Workshop, which produces "Sesame Street." Knell has four children, ages 17, 15, 12 and 8, and the letters of the day in his house are "I" and "M." "I look and they are holding IM conversations with 20 friends. All the arguments in our house are about computer access."
The computer gives kids scope -- they can talk to 20 friends simultaneously. As they get older and more independent, the cell gives them mobility.
America Online, which provides the most-used instant messaging service through AOL subscriptions and its free AOL Instant Messaging service (AIM), estimates that by 2005 IMs will surpass e-mail as the primary way of communicating online. Right now 1.6 billion AOL and AIM IMs are sent every day.
Says spokesman Derick Mains, "the service virtually lights up after school as students get home to chat."
AOL is -- of course -- fueling the fire by adding extras that kids love, taking the IM smiley face signs to new levels with customized signatures, instant greetings that flash and dance across the screen and personalized "away" messages ("I'm in the shower right now . . .").
The theory of "away" messages, for those times when you are on the Internet but away from your computer, says Tannen, "is that you're always supposed to be available." When you're not, she says, the "away" message is your apology.
A variation of the "away" message -- and the ultimate indignity -- is when someone has blocked your screen name, which prevents your IMs from getting through.
"When I come home from school, I get on the Internet right away," says Lucy Bascom, a seventh-grader at Bethesda's Westland Middle School. "There are usually 10 to 20 people online and we talk all at once. We talk about school, friends." Homework questions still are left to the phone, not IMs, she says. IMs may be closing in on phone chat, but the mechanism hasn't killed it completely.
"Sometimes it's simultaneous," says Lucy's dad John Bascom, who says his 13-year-old daughter multitasks pretty effectively between the two.
But IMing got so all-consuming for Lucy several years ago that her parents installed software to limit her online time. Now she gets an hour a day of IMing, an hour of Internet time for checking her e-mails and Web sites, and additional offline computer time for typing her homework.
When she's on the phone, she says, she's usually talking to someone whom she is also IMing. "Something might come up that they don't want to say online," she says. But basically she prefers the computer to the phone. "It's really convenient to say things you wouldn't have the confidence to say on the phone," says Lucy. "There are no long awkward pauses when you are trying to think of a word."
And, she says, IMs can be cut and pasted and sent to another friend, or printed out and carried to school the next day. "If you're having a fight with someone, and you didn't know what to say," she says, you just send out copies of the conversation to friends and ask them how to respond. Sometimes friends will IM the person you're arguing with and defend you, says Lucy.
Lily Karlin, a sixth-grader at Westland, agrees that IMs are better than the phone. "It's quick and easy," she says.
With instant messages, Tannen says, "you can send out a feeler" to a person of the opposite sex "without committing too much. In person, if you don't get a reaction, it's humiliating. Online, if you don't, nobody has to know.
"It's especially easier for boys," she says. "Girls need to talk. For boys, their first social interaction is usually physical, roughhousing, pushing. It's not talk. This may make it easier for them to talk."
Ben Liroff, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Arlington Traditional School, says he IMs both boys and girls and doesn't see much difference between that and talking with them. Still, he prefers IMs "because it's easier and there are no distractions."
He also uses IMs to alert friends to Web sites he discovers, especially "about the new Mini Cooper" car, which his friends are very excited about. He keeps in touch with cousins around the country through IMing, and holding more than one IM conversation isn't hard. "I'm a pretty fast typer," he says. "I just switch between screens."
"Some of the kids who are the shyest in person are the ones who are most comfortable online," says Semi Nasseri, who sees IMing really picking up with her 10-year-old son's age group. "They pass a list of screen names around so everyone knows how to reach you.
"A lot of these kids who are passive-aggressive are very aggressive online," she says, adding that there is a growing back-and-forth, which wouldn't otherwise exist, between the students at the boys' school her son attends and the girls at a sister school. "They are not developing the interpersonal skills they need. And they are being rushed to deal with the opposite sex before they've had a chance to deal with the opposite sex in person."
"For boys, it's a lot easier than the phone," echoes Vicky Rideout of the Kaiser Family Foundation, who researches how kids get their information these days. "That transition to using the phone is not as easy for them as it is for girls. With an instant message, there is no such thing as a long awkward silence. For boys, that can be a comfort."
Maybe for girls, too.
One 10-year-old girl, described by another mom as "so shy she was almost rude," barely took a breath after snubbing a group of boys at a dance class, only to IM them as soon as she got home.
Tannen offers some words of encouragement to parents, who see their connection to their kids being lost to electronic pen pals. As kids get older and head off to college, IMs and e-mail keep them in daily touch with parents they would never think of calling every day.[snip]
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