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Instant messaging is all
the rage with teens

Have you ever walked into your child's room and found him or her tapping away madly at the keyboard? Wondering what in the heck is going on? I can assure you that they are not working on the next great American novel.

Chances are they are communicating with friends via IM, aka Instant Messaging. This phenomenon has unleashed a flurry of typing among teens, colleagues and co-workers around the world. Feel left out? Don't be too dismayed. This trend has crept up from geeks to youngsters and is now common in large corporations.

According to IBM, instant messaging is the fastest-growing communications medium of all time, reaching 50 million users in just two years, compared with six years for e-mail.

A study several years ago by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said teenagers have adopted the Internet and instant messaging so fully that it has even replaced face-to-face communication as the primary mode of interacting for some teens.

The 2001 study concluded that of the approximately 13 million American teenagers who use the Net, 74 percent use instant messaging. Amazingly, one-fifth of the teens using IM say it is their primary means of communicating with friends. The study extrapolated the results from a survey of 754 youngsters between the ages of 12 and 17 and their parents.

I believe teens have embraced IM in part because they can operate under the radar of their parents. What's more, from the perspective of most parents, a teen's use of IM is unobtrusive. You don't know what they are up to unless you're looking over their shoulder.

This lack of intrusiveness is particularly evident when compared with the incessant use of the good old-fashioned telephone among older generations. (Although nowadays kids all seem to have cell phones, too.) At least you don't have to nag them to get off the phone so you can use it.

The fundamentals of IM are easy to understand. You simply type some verbiage and hit return. The person on the other end reads it and responds. If you thought e-mail was a sea change from the typewriter, IM is even stranger to the uninitiated.

A typical IM session begins when one logs into the service. There are many offerings of free IM, of which AIM (AOL Instant Messaging) is the most popular. Other users who have included this user in their "Buddy List" receive notification that this user is now online and available.

Once logged in, the user can send and receive text messages with other users who are logged in using the same software. These conversations typically take place between two participants although some software supports "chat rooms."

If you are a parent, should you be concerned?

A great deal has been written about sexual predators roaming chat rooms. Parents should be concerned, but given the right warnings and proper supervision, I would not be worried. It's like your mom told you, "Don't talk to strangers." If your child doesn't know who is IMing him or her, don't answer - or better yet block them from connecting.

I believe that this can be a positive medium for teen talk. Amanda Lenhart, principal author of the Pew report, explains it this way: Children can "keep in touch with people they normally would not because instant messaging can be a more casual way of talking with someone you met at summer camp or someone you have not seen in awhile."

Another good thing, it's free, if you can tolerate ads that pay for the support of the service.

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