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Readers' comments on any of these resources are alsways welcome! Do email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.IM anthropology: 11-to-15-year-olds' virtual community
"I had the chance to observe an IM chat once," Dr. Robert Price told me in a recent phone interview. "It wasn't about anything; it wasn't a conversation. It was more like graffiti than a conversation." This observation of Haworth School's tech coordinator would probably sound about right to any adult observing middle-school students' instant-messaging conversations. When I watch a session of my 13-year-old's, it seems like a sort of digital snowball fight - a playful group experience with lots of what might be suggestive of communication - not apparently meaningful, yet so meaningful to the participants.
"It's so important at this age level to be part of a group," Dr. Price continued. "IM is nice enough to provide a 'group' [a buddy list] without actually requiring participants to be a social group - they don't have to commit to the normal or historical responsibilities of being a group of friends." When he says this, I'm reminded of junior-high dances of yore, with lots of "dancing" on the edges of actually dancing.
At the middle-school level, it seems, people need to try out various social concepts (e.g., peer groups, personal and group identity) and move fluidly in and out of them; and IM allows them to do that "safely" (in an emotional sense) better than any tool previously available. That makes it very compelling to them - sometimes too compelling, parents feel. But our kids' IM-ing also offers insights - into what they're dealing with at school and in their social lives - which might help us in our parenting.
Instant-messaging "is so new that when you take the time to examine it, you can learn a whole lot. We still have all the typical middle-school issues, just with a new playground," Price adds. At his school in Haworth, N.J., nobody's really gotten hurt on this virtual playground. "When kids play outside, sometimes it gets a little rough, someone pushes somebody down," he said, but nothing like the swirl of school community-wide communication that happened when IM-ing took off in a Salt Lake City middle school a couple of years ago.
When IM-ing does get "a little rough," he says, "I guess one of the problems is, it's not face-to-face, so a lot of the social pressure valves don't exist. Words are probably not this age group's strongest suit, and there are no facial expressions involved [just emoticons!], no nuance. It's basically another opportunity to get into the same old scuffles they always could get into."
Price's antennae are up for comments like, "You're not my friend if you don't give me your password," something no child should feel pressured to do (we need to talk to our kids about that). "Harmless" tricks being played on someone who lets a trickster have his or her screenname and password can lead to hurt feelings or worse, when the trickster impersonates the person in IM. A 13-year-old boy I know (Boy #1) found that a friend (Boy #2), while hanging out at his house, had used Boy #1's IM account to jokingly "confess" via IM that he (Boy #1) was gay, to friends on Boy #1's buddy list (who might not have known it was a joke). Fortunately, no one was hurt. If it had been hurtful, e.g., started rumors, blog entries, etc., it would've fallen into the category of "cyberbullying," or online social cruelty (see my 9/10/04 issue). Sometimes the line is fine.
Then there's the "addiction" question that came up in a recent phone interview I had with dad and software developer Jonathan Greif, who used the word in this middle-school context. He has a bias because he created and markets I.M. Control software*, a solution for "IM addiction." But he's also the father of two active IM-ers, 17 and 13, and when the former was 14, he felt she was "addicted to IM" - "often glued to the screen for hours at a time ... to the sacrifice of her school work, family responsibilities, and normal healthy interactions with her friends and family members," Greif said (see bullets below for more on the addiction Q). He believed a lot of other families were dealing with this, so he went to work developing a solution.
Now, at his house, "we use IM as a negotiating tool," as in "Dad, I did all my homework and my science teacher says I had the best project in the class - can I get some 'bonus time'," said Greif, referring to something his 13-year-old will say. "Bonus time" is a feature in the software that allows parents to maintain the settings (for regularly scheduled IM time) while occasionally adding a chunk of time for "reward" IM-ing.
But most fascinating is what goes on on those screens. Haworth School's Bob Price told me, "I've had a couple of girls tell me things can get tricky when they're talking to five people at the same time. That's five separate, simultaneous conversations - five [IM] windows open. One will be sending a message to Mary. Then Kathy sends a message, and suddenly that window's the active one. It's very easy to cause a fight accidentally [or not] by sending a message to the active-window person that was meant for someone in an inactive window [which just fades out a little bit when another window goes active]."
I asked Price if they ever go into IM chatrooms (and chat as a group). Not really, he said. "That's like on a real playground - everybody can hear what you're saying. With five separate conversations, no one but you has the big picture." That's an interesting comment on control or a kind of social safety they like to maintain. Price used this analogy: "IM's more like passing notes, but in a sophisticated, more instantaneous way. You have the opportunity to be part of a group, the 'buddy list,' but you don't have to commit to a specific social group. They can eliminate that but still have the communication [and social experimentation] they want to have." There are benefits to losing that sense of definition and formality, apparently.
They can also have 10 screennames and accounts if they want, I.M. Control's Greif points out, not to mention a 199-member buddy list ("my kids were up to the 199 limit within a month or two," he said). So on one side of the screen, you have five conversations going on in MSN Messenger, on another you're talking with people through your browser via AIM Express or Yahoo (or, later this year, AOL's Triton! - see below). "When you put your name up on a buddy list, everyone can see if you're online, and you may not want that," Greif said, "so you'll have a different screenname they can't see." Even in IM, people like a measure of privacy, after all!
There's so much more to say on the subject (I'm picturing a 12-year-old at the hub of a mini-universe of communications, sometimes in stealth mode, sometimes not, usually feeling in control of what's happening on the screen, or at least what s/he says, but sometimes making slips and feeling anxious, etc., etc.)....
But I'd like to hear what you have to say, about IM-ing at your house. Email me stories, rules, concerns, developments, etc., via anne@netfamilynews.org.
More IM news & views
- AIM on steroids - that what AOL's new IM service, "Triton," will be like. Due out around the end of the year, it will "integrate text, audio, video, and future forms of communication" (for the super-flexibility IM-ers like) and will have "tabs to manage tabs to manage a growing list of contacts" for bigger buddy lists and neater desktops, the Associated Press reports. Not to mention a fresh crop of family PC security risks. [AOL is planning just one more update of 10-year-old AIM, now at version 5.9.]
- The addiction question. MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle has spoken out against use of the term "Internet addiction" - she explained why to Katie Hafner of the New York Times (fifth Q down). When I asked Haworth School's Bob Price about this, he emailed me: "I am also not comfortable with the word 'addicted,' and I have not seen the kind of manic devotion to IM to raise it to the level of an addiction. It is more like the addiction some kids have to chewing gum - it keeps them busy, it is social, a little radical, and lets them be part of the group. When you tell a middle school student that they cannot chew gum today or they cannot IM this evening, you get about the same reaction."
- For more IM "anthropology," see this interesting interview with a 17-year-old IM-er in a University of Washington professor's blog on child development and technology.
- *Parental controls for IM: I.M. Control, mentioned above, is specific to instant-messaging. The software doesn't take kids offline if they need the Web for research, and it offers multiple accounts for various levels of maturity in an IM-ing household. Even multi-featured filtering or monitoring software can't, to this degree, help families for whom IM is the main Net attraction.
- For Part 1 on this subject - last week's "Kids' IM-ing: A teacher's perspective" - click here.
Next week: An 11-year-old avid IM-er's dad on what he does/doesn't like about IM, and other views.
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