Teens Use Technology Their Way

By Shannon Henry and John Schwartz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 24, 1999; Page A1

School's out for the day, and it's too early for "Dawson's Creek." So, naturally, Tara Dieterle is hanging with her friends – not at the mall, not at 7-11, but online.

The 15-year-old from Oakton has about 70 kids on her "buddy list," an electronic roster of her Internet friends. When she logs on to America Online, her computer flashes a list of who's around.

– Do you have the teen people with drew barrymore on the cover?

– I heard the cops found more bombs in the basement . . .

In the rush to explain the Columbine High School massacre, the dark side of the Internet has drawn as much blame as any other factor. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold haunted the Internet and created pages on the World Wide Web spewing their anger.

In a Gallup poll this week, 82 percent of those surveyed said the Internet was at least partly to blame for the shootings, and 34 percent thought it was one of the factors that "deserves a great deal of blame." (By comparison, 60 percent cited availability of guns as a factor that deserves a great deal of blame; 49 percent cited TV, movies and music; and 34 percent pointed to media coverage.)

Those who track the activities of adolescents on the Internet insist it might have been more surprising if the Littleton killers didn't spend time online. At least for youngsters on the prosperous side of what's been called the "digital divide," cyberspace is the place to be.

But Tara and many kids of the computer generation say their online experience bears little resemblance to the frightening picture painted in a thousand headlines about the shootings. Teens acknowledge the risks of the online world but say they have learned to take care of themselves; they avoid the rough neighborhoods of cyberspace just as they'd skirt a city's tenderloin district.

In the chat rooms and buddy lists where teens and preteens spend their after-school hours, there's no shortage of chilling stories as the ones Tara tells of being accosted online by strangers who invite themselves to the party and send creepy e-mail. "It freaked me out," Tara said.

So Tara and her friends retreat to a private world of e-relationships, a more immediate and intimate way to chat known as "Instant Messages" on AOL, but also available from software with names like Powwow and AOL offshoot ICQ ("I Seek You"). The technology, along with the buddy lists, allows users to send private notes within their circle of friends, with several conversations going at once.

As new friends join in on Tara's line, the computer emits the slow, creaking sound of a door opening. The kids speed up their typed riffs by salting in popular online acronyms like "lol" (that made me Laugh Out Loud) and "bf" (boyfriend).

Tara is carrying on five conversations at once, four online and one with a visitor. She's reading e-mail, too. How does she keep the threads from getting tangled? It's a mystery of the young mind. "After school, if you don't have anything planned, it's a way to relax before you start your homework," Tara said, digital Ritalin for the attention-deficit generation.

Some 10 million children spend time online, according to the research firm Find/SVP, and kids make up the fastest-growing segment of Internet users. The first generation to grow up online is one of the biggest players in the worldwide computer network. "AOL literally lights up after school," said company spokeswoman Regina Lewis.

Like teenagers down through the decades, kids are tying up the phone. But these days, it's likely to be connected to a modem. "I don't have any friends who don't have an e-mail address," Tara said.

Some kids remain partial to the chat rooms found on AOL and various Web sites. James Bricker, 15, of Lakeridge, said he's more comfortable shooting the bull online than face to face. His online persona is "looser," bolder. He proudly claims his longest online session was an eight-hour jag last summer. James loves being able to edit himself, avoiding the blurted faux pas that induce adolescent agony: "You can watch what you're saying and if it doesn't sound right, you can change it."

A growing number of adolescents go well beyond chatting online, publishing personal pages on the Web that broadcast their likes and dislikes. Some, like Littleton killer Eric Harris, create dark, forbidding self-portraits. But most are innocuous, even vapid.

"Kids used to put posters up on their walls – now they put them up on a Web page," said Esther Dyson, head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's how they express themselves."

A growing roster of companies has sprung up to serve that market, offering customers free Web pages and the tools to slap them together. "You make the pages. . . . We make it easy" is the slogan on the home page of Angelfire, a service of the Lycos Network. Such companies aim to profit by building communities of users and then selling other online services to those customers and advertising to companies that want to reach them.

These online experiences can help youngsters over the rocky shoals of adolescence, said Idit Harel, founder of MaMaMedia, a youth Web site. Adolescents often feel powerless, Harel said: They can't drive, and they chafe under parental authority. But boot up a computer, and most of them enjoy a crushing techno-superiority over their parents. They dive into computing while the grown-ups are still poring over the manual. Harel calls it "hard fun" – a fulfilling challenge.

Robert Kraut, a social psychologist who studies human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, made headlines last year with a study that found the Internet can leave some users feeling slightly more socially isolated and depressed.

But Kraut's preliminary research on instant messaging's tight networks of buddies indicates that the technology actually supports strong bonds of friendship, something often missing in chat rooms filled largely with strangers.

Adolescence, of course, can be a troubled time, and researchers who study teen Internet habits say the online personas teens choose reflect that. Online relationships can expose teens to emotional ups and downs they might not be prepared for, said Marje Monroe, a clinical counselor who has studied kids' use of the Internet at several boarding schools.

She has seen teenagers develop intensely romantic relationships by electronic mail, sharing their deepest secrets without ever having met. "It puts kids into a social situation that they're often ill-equipped to handle and that adults are ill-equipped to help them with," she said.

"Kids used to put posters up on their walls – now they put them up on a Web page."

– Esther Dyson, Electronic Frontier Foundation

"She was so grateful that he was paying attention to her that what he was saying may not have been as important as the fact that he was corresponding with her," Monroe said.

Many kids who spend hours online each day say they have seen the ugly side of the Internet, but describe it as less traumatic than yucky. When James Bricker was propositioned in an AOL chat room by a man, he was proud of himself for reporting the lech to AOL authorities. He's offended by sexual junk mail – "it's not the kind of thing you want to open your mailbox to" – but shrugs it off.

Experts suggest that parents pay attention to how their kids portray themselves online. Dyson said the Web's public nature could actually make kids' worldviews more transparent than they were in the pre-electronic era: "It is more visible than it used to be. Better that you . . . find it [online] than find it scribbled in a diary."

"As a parent, if my child set up a Web page I would certainly want to see it," said Elizabeth Hemming, a computer instructor at Green Acres School in Rockville. "You don't want your child putting up too much information out there."

Last year Congress made it illegal for commercial Web sites to collect personal information about kids, but the law can do nothing to prevent kids from freely publishing information about themselves. Child safety advocates stress that youngsters should never give out personal information online, whether on Web pages or in chats with strangers.

Such monitoring is even more important if the child's site turns out to have the kind of angry diatribes on the sites associated with the Littleton murderers – content that should raise "a red flag for anybody – somebody calling out for help," Hemming said.

Counselor Monroe said parents can help children mature and let them "begin to take risks in a safe place" even on the Internet. She suggested keeping the computer in a room the whole family uses, and having an ongoing conversation about the family's values. Filtering software, she said, is an imperfect solution, but she added that most packages include a valuable feature that allows parents to limit the amount of time children spend online.

Tara's conversation goes on. She is the center of her own private party, a digital social butterfly. She's so hooked on the social rush that her 11-year-old brother programmed her computer to deliver a special message when her e-mailbox is empty:

"You've got no mail – loser."

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

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