Metablog

Instant Messaging in Teen Life

While this summary is really crude, I promise I will update it as soon as I get some time.

This paper "Instant Messaging in Teen Life" by Grinter ET AL is a survey a group of teenagers + one 20 year old guy to find out the importance of IM in a teenager's life.
First few sections are dedicated to introduction of IM and different kinds of IM services available. In the following sections, the author provides an explanation as to why their study is relevant in context of CSCW; how the study is conducted and a summary of participants involved in this study. The last section and also the most dominant section is categorized to describe the findings by the authors.

They begin with describing the features available in a chat service and the history of IM, which dates back to 22 years. Among several multi-way real-time text chat services were Multi User Dungeons (MUD), Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and zephyr. However, there is a distinction in use of the above mentioned chat services. Services like IRC and MUD were used to chat with "people who do not know each other in real space" on topics of common interest. In contrast zephyr communications were topic centered with constrained set of users. Now days, chat services are used to converse with "known others." The main advantage as pointed out by the authors is the convenience of conversing without being interrupted aids in workplace and to maintain social ties.

Following are the insights provided by the study in context of CSCW:
· Teenage use of IM demonstrates the adoption of collaborative technology in home and this study provides its role in the domestic ecology.
· This study shows the awareness of teenagers as private & public people simultaneously.
· The communication pattern allows us to predict what to expect from them in future.

The study reveals that technology plays the most dominant role in IM trends. Teenagers who are connected to internet via DSL/Cable chat more often than teens with modem. Also, peer-pressure dictates what services are used by the teenagers, as they feel left out if they don’t use IM. The primary reason for choosing to use IM is that is it free and many long distance friends can be reached with low cost.
Studies also found that teens don’t use chat rooms as they were “waste of time”. The peer group consisted of their real space relationships. If they did chat in public chat rooms, it is limited to topic organized topic.
Teens use IM primarily to socialize. Many teenagers used IM to chat after school about school as they had little time to talk face to face. The continuous use of IM developed a sense of expectation as to when their friends would be online. IM use by teenagers can be categorized into three categories namely socializing, event planning and school collaboration.

So here are some questions and I will refine them as I get time.

But I found some things in this survey rather strange.

1. The author mentioned that teens get annoyed if their friends don’t use IM. While this could be true, I find it hard to absorb that teens don’t use phone to converse with them. In fact, my first hand findings insinuate that the teens use phone much more than they use IM.
2. Teens are more “computer aware” then their parent, however, none of the teens mentioned anything about their IMs being recorded.
3. While the survey mentioned that IM can be both good and bad. However, there is growing annoyance in using IM these days, in regard to being offline while being online. That is sometimes you leave your machines and the IM is still on. When someone IM’s you they don’t get a response they tend to think they are being avoided.
4. Also, IM might be a way to communicate they don’t “show” any emotions and thus it is hard to understand what impression we are giving to the other person.

Posted by jkotak at January 22, 2004 10:41 AM